Ελληνικά
2016, so far, has several good releases to show, some of which left me pleasantly surprised. One of them was the debut of The Slayerking, a project from the member of Nightfall, Efthymis Karadimas.
Their first releasy, titled “SANATANA DHARMA”, is a complex album that analyzes specific concepts and introduces us to personas that were created by the band members. This complex nature that characterizes this release creates the necessity for an analysis of the different elements that make up the whole of The Slayerking and “SANATANA DHARMA”.
Let’s start with the name of the band. The Slayerking is a character based on medieval monks. His destiny is to avenge any authority that cursed mankind to suffer in the name of Gods and Kings. But like every creature he too has a dual nature, his dark side, the anger he feels can be temporarily alleviated by the caress of a creature that brings light into his darkness. Using this persona, the group not only tries to show us its style but at the same time it tries to show us its musical roots. So their story goes on, a princess called Sarah Black Sabbath paired with a frog once and his name was Kerry the Bastard. The result was the birth of a son with a nose so big that it had 4 strings attached to it. In a dream he saw demonic figures dancing around a pit soaked with the blood of people who had their bodies engraved with the symbol of a queen. There he saw a man with female genitalia and that man played the drums and danced. There he saw the king and swore in his dream to find and kill him. And this myth for Slayerking became a lullaby that was sung by the grandmother to the dragon girl:
“No matter what my dear Slayerking
You will someday become
Children never get away from
The genes their parents have
And you shall always be known
To us and the entire world
As the gracious furious
Black Sabbath Bastard’s son!”
And he continues slaying without mercy all hope that mankind has for its Gods and he still think he is a king when he is just a slayer.
The title of the album is not accidental either. The phrase Sanatana Dharma is part of Sanskrit literature and it basically refers to the concept of cosmic order, the eternal and the non-stop rotation.
In this context, the non-stop movement and eternity, the meaning of lyrics changes. After all, every song either has its own concept on a philosophical level or dives deep in the human psych.
The possessive love, that unnatural bond that is characterized by dependence and a sense of ownership in a relationship, a situation that is clearly not healthy and can lead a human soul to its annihilation, is the concept behind “She is My Lazarus”.
“Black Mother of the Lord of Light” is about every man’s futile fight against his weak nature and when he fails he starts looking for help to external factors such as religion. Our mind is the Black Mother that gives birth to the Lord of Light, a God who, supposedly, will save us.
Following the same dark patterns of futility, the band continues with “Sargon of Akkad”, talking about time, the devourer of everything. “Time is a beast, it’s not divine; what man creates it does despise”.
“Magnificent Desolation” is inspired by a phrase from Buzz Aldrin (one of Apollo 11 mission members). When Armstrong described the view as a “Magnificent sight”, Aldrin replied “Magnificent desolation”.
Apart from blackness and nihilism, human nature is also defined by the concept of change. This is what the band is trying to show with “We Are the End”, about the events and development of humanity in recent years. How from happiness, sex and alcohol we now see war becoming commonplace and in this age of crisis we see the rebirth of old ideas and policies that are changing a huge part of our lives.
The above mentioned changes are not always good, especially if we consider our past as a species. “My Lai”, as its title clearly shows, directly refers to the 1968 Vietnam massacre with the same name. And this is just an example of humanity’s dark nature and hatred, one example among so many shameful moments.
And between these moments of shame we discover extremely clever moments. Allies during WW2 created fake documents, put them on corpses and threw them into the sea. Their purpose was to make their opponents think that the corpses belonged to someone important and change their strategy on those fake documents. Was it ethical to use a corpse in a way like that (Operation Mincemeat)? ?No one can answer with ease and that ethical question is the concept of “The Man that Never Was”.
Finally we have the “Southern Gate of the Sun”, a song that deals with a historical event and its great irony. In 1769 lightning struck a church in Brescia, Italy. It cause the explosion of the 90 tonnes of gunpowder that were stored in the church and the death of 3000 people. The irony is even greater than storing gunpowder in a church. Lightning rods have already been discovered but many priests thought that the placement of one would provoke the wrath of God as an act against his will.
