How About That Thing?

Everybody has their favorite metal musician. Some will name legendary guitarists like Dave Mustane, or Dime Bag. Some will bring up amazing vocalists like Bruce Dickenson, or Hansi Kursch. Some will say bass players like Les Claypool, or Jason Newsted. A few might even name drummers like Neil Peart, or keyboardists like… Uh… That one guy. You know the one.

I’m not here to disprove any of your claims. To each their own, that’s my mantra anymore. Hell, I might even agree with some of your picks, if not already, then maybe after a listen or two.

However, when I think of a rock or metal musician that blew my mind and changed my outlook forever, there’s one guy that comes to mind immediately. An that man is Pete Johansen.

Yes, I’m being very serious right now. While I definitely have a degree of admiration for a lot of the musicians I listed above, and many others to boot, Pete Johansen holds a very special place in my heart.

In the 90s, the deathdoom genre, now apparently known as gothic metal in order to get more albums onto the playlists of Hot Topic vampire kids, was pretty much all the rage out there in Norway. From what I observed, it was like black metal’s slower, more talented, somewhat hotter sister. It was just as dark, but instead of playing fast and featuring a vocalist that sounded like a dying cat, it played slow and featured operatic vocals. Usually from a female vocalist. Some bands included harsh vocals along with the operatic ones, and this style of vocal arrangement quickly became known as “beauty and the beast vocals” throughout the scene.

I admit that, in my ignorance, I often got black metal and deathdoom mixed up in my younger days. After all, they both came from Norway, they both sang about very dark subject matter, they both featured vocalists whose first language CLEARLY wasn’t English, and they both thoroughly pissed off my dad. It’s an honest mistake.

Nowadays, I know better. And, upon retrospect, I honestly liked deathdoom a lot better. Suffice to say, albums from Tristania remain a fixture in my CD collection, where as my Dimmu Borgir and Gorgaroth albums ended up in the donation pile after a couple years went by and I got bored with it.

Speaking of Tristania, guess what ended up being my favorite band in the deathdoom scene overall? If you guessed Theater of Tragedy… Wow, you really stopped paying attention a couple paragraphs ago, didn’t you?

So yeah, my first real exposure to the deathdoom scene was Tristania. And Tristania was where I discovered the majesty of Pete Johansen himself. In a genre that was ripe with keyboardists, Johansen was one of the few, if any, that I knew of who played actual honest to god violin. And it was that authentic violin that really made me fall in love with Tristania from that point… Up until 2005 when they got rid of him for whatever reason.

Without the haunting violin solos, Tristania’s 2005 album just lacked a certain oomph. Not helped by the fact other deathdoom bands were turning to electronica from that point onward, it seemed. Gone were the haunting melodies, and in came all these weird techno beats that made this sound less like a funeral dirge, and more like the soundtrack of some lame nightclub all those equally lame hot topic vampire kids like to go to.

Over the decades, though, I’ve tried to keep up with Johansen’s work. And, as it turns out, he’s been doing violin work for multiple bands over the years.

Perhaps the most noteworthy is The Sins of Thy Beloved. They only lasted for about two albums, and the sophomore album quite honestly left a thing or two to be desired. But that first album… Wow! “Lake of Sorrow” features some of Johansen’s best work. The lyrics tend to leave something to be desired, reading like the kind of embarrassing poetry I used to write when I was fifteen, complete with lines like “you will never know my pain, my suffering”, but dat violin. As the kids say nowadays, chef’s kiss.

He also did work on an album by Sirenia. I don’t own that album, but I’ve really been meaning to get around to that.

Currently, he’s done violin work for Art of Departure: a deathdoom supergroup of sorts featuring members of Tristania, Sirenia, and Green Carnation all fused together into one depressing as fuck band that put out their first EP earlier this year. I highly recommend this self-titled EP, and I hope this isn’t the last of the band. I’d love to see a full album by these guys in the future.

In the process of writing this album, it’s come to my attention that Johansen also did violin work for The Scarr. Since I’ve only figured out who these guys are fairly recently, I can’t really say much, other than I’m looking forward to having a moment to listen to these guys.

It’s very rare for me to follow ANY musician around this fanatically. Much as I adored Cradle of Filth in high school, I found myself giving Danni Filth’s other band, Devilment, a hard pass. I grew to appreciate Primus a lot more in adulthood, but I really didn’t care for The Claypool Lennon Delirium, or The Flying Frog Brigade. And while I adore Hansi Kursch’s vocals in Blind Guardian, I just couldn’t get into Demons & Wizards to save my life. And while that was technically YEARS before the guitarist for that band got involved with the Jan 6 insurrection attempt of 2021… Yeah, that really didn’t help sway my opinion anywhere near the opposite direction.

But I’ve found myself following Johansen from band to band with no exception. True, some bands have held my attention more than others, but if you’ve got Johansen playing that violin, I guarantee you have my attention.

And I think Johansen as a whole was a pretty big influence on my outlook on what is metal and what isn’t. Specifically, he took the violin: an instrument I associated with country more than metal, and made it fuckinf metal. And I think that right there is what made me grow to appreciate both violin music as a whole, and quirky subgenres like folk metal, or synphonic metal over the years.

No other musician has ever held this distinction of holding my attention acrossed multiple bands. The only people who’ve come close are Dime Bag, and possibly Thomas Winkler. Even then, there’s no telling for sure, since Dime Bag was murdered during Damageplan’s infancy, and Angus McSix might not be around forever for all I know. Where as Johansen has a career stretching across decades with multiple bands, and I don’t think I’ve found one that I’ve hated ever. I hope that he continues the good work.