Buzzard (Doom Folk Metal)
Darkness Wins
Relentlessly bleak but maddeningly catchy lead single from the critically acclaimed 13-track doom folk metal album Mean Bone, available on CD and tape.
The song is a pessimistic response to the optimistic statement made by Detective Cohle at the end of True Detective, Season 1: “If you ask me, the light’s winning.”
In his essay “Through a Ligottian Lens: Session 9 and True Detective,” weird fiction author Jon Padgett discusses how the HBO series incorporates the cosmic pessimism of Thomas Ligotti into the monologues of Matthew McConaughey’s character, who spouts passages nearly verbatim from Ligotti’s anti-natalist treatise The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. However, despite the show’s pervasive bleakness, the final episode betrays its Ligottian nihilism with a pat whodunit conclusion in which our heroes nab the “Scooby Doo villain,” as author Laird Barron quips. Hope is rekindled, however tentatively.
Besides Padgett’s essay, another inspiration for the song is Brandon Trenz’s artwork for the Chiroptera Press edition of Michigan Basement: the ghostly carnival, the oppressive darkness, the raw dread. The music of “Darkness Wins” poured forth naturally from the lyrics, made possible by a lifetime listening to Sabbath, Candlemass, and Trouble.
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