By Owen Coggins

In 2015, an extreme metal band named Batushka appeared, with details about band-members scarce. A deliberately cultivated sense of mystery surrounded their album entitled Litourgiya, featuring a cover which reproduced an orthodox-style icon, heavy on the gold paint (it actually closely resembled another unusual metal album cover, from Advaitic Songs by the band Om, but that’s another story). The music was a gripping combination of pummeling riffs, thunderous percussion and hoarse screeching, but all this guitar distortion and screaming was centred around a chanting of the Russian Orthodox liturgy.

Litourgiya by BATUSHKA This absorbing combination quickly gathered attention online, and soon enough word had spread to the point that the album has been released in at least twenty different editions on a variety of formats. Soon enough there was an intensive tour schedule, with the stage show including copious amounts of candles, incense in swinging censers, musicians masked and clothed in lavish robes, and an ornately framed painted icon held up at the beginning of the set and then placed reverentially on a lectern. The band’s luminously beautiful website is so rich in religious symbolism you can practically smell it. Of course, the one thing that sells better in the metal underground than great music, is great music shrouded in intrigue and opaque ritual. Two questions continue to be asked about Batushka: what is the identity of the musicians? And what is their religious status?

Metal bands have always, from the earliest origins of the genre in the early 1970s, played ambivalently with the symbols of ritual and religion. Black Sabbath wore large crucifixes on stage and addressed the devil in their eponymous track, while their first album famously featured an inverted cross in the inner gatefold (placed there by designers, as legend has it, unbeknownst to the band). Since then, various bands have combined or contrasted pagan and Christian symbols, played with various versions of Satanism, and expressed all imaginable kinds of religious and anti-religious positions. Participants in metal cultures, as well as external onlookers, have often sought to ask similar kinds of questions: is this music, this band, or this track, anti-Christian? Is it Christian? Is it Satanic? Is it religious?

Researchers too have often framed questions similarly, about how metal music cultures and religiosity have collided: asking, for example, how Christian metal bands have negotiated the ‘double controversy’ of their existence which is contested from both sides (such as Marcus Moberg’s work), or how metal scene participants in Muslim-majority countries have dealt with Islam as a moral and political backdrop to musical expression (as in research by Pierre Hecker and Mohammad Magout). More common than these fairly stark cases, however, are metal bands, audiences or scenes which articulate strong but ambivalent interest in religious symbols and sounds. But, as is shown in the insistent questioning surrounding Batushka, many listeners (perhaps unreasonably, even impossibly) want clarity about the musical and religious status of what they are consuming.

Comments on YouTube postings of Batushka’s music reveal a rich array of opinions, concerns and positions, including many in Russian and other languages. Alongside the usual recommendations of related music and needlessly aggressive discussions that are found in such corners of the internet, many listeners appear deeply concerned with questions of whether the music ‘is’ religious or the band members ‘are’ critical of Christianity, an issue which is exacerbated by the anonymity of the musicians. Speculation abounds about who the musicians are, in particular if Nergal, frontman of well-known metal band Behemoth, is involved. As two different commenters have it:

Nergal is 100% confirm. Nergal wasn’t there. 100% confirm. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4Xva5btheA)

Contestation about this individual’s involvement also relates to uncertainty about the religious status of the music. Nergal and his Behemoth bandmates were briefly jailed in and then deported from Russia during a tour, widely regarded as a result of pressure from Orthodox activists due to the band’s Satanic imagery; recently Marilyn Manson and Cannibal Corpse concerts in Russia have also attracted Orthodox protestors. So, the theory goes, if Nergal was in Batushka, Nergal is anti-Russian, therefore Batushka are anti-Russian Orthodox: the music is blasphemous.

Ideas about national identity seem to be relevant here, and the structure of Nergal’s supposed personal grudge is repeated in a broader argument connecting the one undisputed fact about the musicians to the question of religious status. It is widely reported that the band members are Polish, and this is not disputed. Several commenters note that this is audible in the accents of the singing, so for some this is a sonic marker of identity. It is suggested by one YouTube commenter that the contemporary swell of anti-Russian sentiment in Poland indicates the likelihood of Polish musicians wishing to challenge Russia through its national church. Polish musicians equal anti-Russian sentiment, and anti-Russian sentiment equals anti-Russian Orthodox church, so the argument goes.

Clearly, many commenters are invested in the interconnection of nationality and (anti-)religiosity, and in the idea that people must or at least should have fixed, stable and clear identities. However, Batushka’s musical productions and their excessive play with religious signifiers seem to provoke and yet frustrate such wishes for clarity. This can be seen in the structure of many comments, which assert that identities are singular and static, but must acknowledge uncertainty and confusion in this case.

As an Orthodox Christian, I’m not so sure this album is actually intended to be as blasphemous as people think it to be[…] What I’m trying to say is, if one day the members will state that the album is NOT ironical or anti-Christian, the animation would not prove them wrong, if explained properly. I believe that the inverted crosses on their robes are nothing but for shock value and/or it depicts in fact the cross of Saint Peter Have you read the lyrics? No matter what the band members themselves say, their lyrics are without a doubt christian. Maybe they are iconoclasts? It was a movement within orthodox Christianity as well. In some of the lyrics they essentially quoted scripture, but replaced the word “God” with the word “I”, turning it from third to first person. […] I am not a Christian, but I would probably view this as blasphemous, assuming it’s the correct interpretation. However, there is nothing I’ve found to be explicitly anti-christian either. They apparently leave it up to interpretation. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgfa5UlZAL8)

Ambivalence creeps into apparently fixed statements, and comments claiming to express the most certainty seem to betray the opposite; particularly when juxtaposed with others that are equally adamant that the opposite is true. This multiplicity of views perhaps instead hints at more interesting questions about religion and identity than claims of X is Y, or X is Z, or Y is the opposite of Z. Instead, individual comments and the overall discussion taken as an incomplete whole suggest fascinating possibilities in the unstable claiming and challenging of identities, all of which are developed and contested through ambiguous uses and deployments of religious practices, movements, clothing, symbols, images, icons, sensory markers, and of course, sounds. All of these, in turn, emerge in a global media context of popular culture that is marked by local scenes and particular histories (in this case, including heavy metal music’s fascinating and multifarious relationships with religion), in which mystery and ambiguity can be a crucial source of power. So reading the complex YouTube discussions of liturgy, nationality, and extreme metal subgenres, the most concise example I’ve found so far of a final non-final answer is the following:

Is Batushka anti-religion or not? I can’t seem to find a concrete answer.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgfa5UlZAL8)

Owen Coggins is Honorary Associate of the Religious Studies Department. His book on religion and extreme metal music cultures, Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal, will be published in January 2018 by Bloomsbury Academic.