...and Oceans - As in Gardens, So in Tombs (2023)

Country: Finland
Style: Symphonic Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Jan 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Wikipedia | YouTube

I was surprised to see an album by ...and Oceans pop up out of the blue in 2020. It was their first in eighteen years, after spending plenty of time as industrial band Havoc Unit and death metal band Festerday, their original incarnation. But suddenly they they were with a long overdue fifth album and, only three years later, here's their sixth. I absolutely do not want to go back to eighteen year gaps, but this wasn't as successful for me as its predecessor, gorgeous cover art notwithstanding.

Like Cosmic World Mother, this is mature black metal with symphonic textures wrapped around it and plenty of odd little diversions into other realms. The first of those comes halfway through the opening title track, when the black prog suddenly vanishes as if we've bumped the dial on a radio and accidentally tuned into some sort of crossdimensional eclectica channel. There's what sounds like carnival music with effects, as if someone's playing an American Fotoplayer, the device used to accompany silent movies. Maybe our signal is being hacked; I could see this being the work of Max Headroom. And then we're back to where we were. Very strange.

I wasn't a fan of the first half of the title track. The drums sound OK but the cymbals are awful and I wondered what happened to the glorious mix that I enjoyed so much on the previous album. I was happy when it perks right up after that strange interlude, with beautifully slow melodies laid over frantic blastbeats. I might complain about how it ends just like that, but then The Collector and His Construct continues as if it's the second part of the very same song, so I won't. I like that one a lot, because it plays with that mix of slow melodies over frantic urgency and it does it throughout.

This is the ...and Oceans I want to hear, a band who manage to combine the overwhelming mindset of traditional black metal with elegant melodies that seem utterly effortless. It's as if the album's some sort of vehicle that sits on a thousand mad but highly effective legs that speeds away from us in jagged lines without any hesitation. It seems like it'll be impossible to keep up with it, except that somehow we find ourselves floating in serene fashion above the maelstrom of activity below us and we're able to look down on the fury from a safe place.

Given that this approach is hardly the most immediate to grasp, the question always comes down to how well the songs grow on us with repeat listens. A first time through isn't going to be enough but a second should start to feel right and a third should allow us to start calling out highlights. It played that way for me, the first listen mostly disappointing but the second much improved and a third time through the charm. I'm still not particularly fond of the first few minutes of the album, which seems like the point it ought to grab me hardest, but it kicks in soon enough and maintains its momentum throughout.

The Collector and His Construct is better than the title track, but Within Fire and Crystal is better again, because its contrasts are brighter. I like how it gets doomy in its midsection too. It's a song that gets more interesting the further it goes and I do appreciate those. Carried on Lead Wings is a third strong song in a row, which bodes really well for the album as a whole. Eventually, though, my struggles with the mix took over.

A song like Likt Törnen Genom Kött, with its epic flow lurking in delightful shadows under the main thrust of the music, ought to feel blissfully immersive but I couldn't find how to dive in. I have zero knowledge of how to be a studio engineer, but I can see where the problem is. At my regular level of volume, I found myself focusing extra hard on the backdrop, because it seemed to be too low in the mix. I wanted to hear more of it and the band kept getting in the way. So I turned it up to see if it would burst through at a higher volume, but the drums became annoying in the foreground and they took me out of the experience, even as the bass crept out to be noticed.

Early on, it didn't seem quite right but I was able to cope. Maybe the early songs are good enough that they can climb above the problem, but that doesn't ring true because songs like Likt Törnen Genom Kött and Inverse Magnification Matrix feel like they should be too but the mix stops them from reaching their full potential, from delivering the oomph that they deserve at any volume. I seriously want to hear Antti Simonen's epic keyboard sweep on Inverse Magnification Matrix but it's too hidden.

I don't know to fix this, but it would seem to me that it could be done by pushing and pulling sliders on that mixing desk and that's someone else's job. What's oddest is that it feels inconsistent, as if the engineer changed between sides, which makes little sense. It's certainly more of a problem as we drift out of the first side than earlier. Long story short, I'm happy that this particular group are continuing as ...and Oceans, at least for the present, but this isn't as good an album as it could be. It doesn't seem as progressive as its predecessor, with the dips into wild material asides instead of integral components. I still want to see them live though. I want to see how this translates to stage.

Almach - Don't Look Back (2023)

Country: Afghanistan
Style: Atmospheric Black/Folk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Jan 2023
Sites: Bandcamp

After learning that FFOBR is a thing a couple of days ago, when reviewing Grandma's Ashes' debut album, I learned here that there's a thing in black metal where anonymous musicians using faked or borrowed photos falsely claim to be from Islamic countries. Mostly, they seem to choose Iraq, as Mulla, Janaza and Seeds of Iblis do, but تدنيس claims to be one Saudi Arabian woman and Almach claim to be from Afghanistan. Now, those others tend also to claim involvement with a movement called the Arabic Anti-Islamic Legion and may have ties to the NSBM community, but this one does not, as far as I can tell. So maybe Almach simply haven't been verified to be from Afghanistan and will be in due course.

Wherever they're from, this is drenched in middle eastern folk music, to the degree that whether they're playing these ethnic folk instruments and providing the varied folk voices or not may be a clincher on whether they're authentic or not. It could be that whoever's behind Almach is merely layering guitars, drums and vocals over the folk music of others and nobody's figured out any of the sources yet. Either way, it sounds fascinating, because it's not integrated in the way that folk metal tends to be, with pipers, fiddlers and hurdy-gurdists playing key roles in the band.

Here, the folk music is separate and, while it may overlap with the black metal, it always seems to be doing its own thing, making me wonder about if these musicians even know they're on a black metal album. Sometimes it's the only element there, as on the album's three minute intro, Path of the Night and a minute more into Wolf, the opening track proper. Then it launches confidently into black metal. The drums are furious but not hyperspeed, the guitars have a richer tone than I tend to hear in the genre and the vocals are fierce more than bleak, but it's clearly black metal. And then the folk music returns as the metal cools off.

And so we go. It's a tasty mix, the contrast in styles a fascinating one that's overt throughout the entire album, except when it shifts all the way over to one side, which happens surprisingly rarely. I'm always surprised by how black metal can merge with so many other wildly diverse genres, from ambient to bluegrass, while still maintaining its image as the anti-social family member hiding in the corner while everyone else pretends to get along. Check out Immortal Sun, for instance, when the folk side is ouds and flutes and lovely female vocals, but the guitar turns the theme into a riff and the drums speed up the tempo. This is the most integrated song on the album, I think, but it's still surely metal musicians playing over a recording. They just do it well here.

What surprised me most, after how much the initial sound relies on that musical contrast and how much folk music there is here, is how the black metal varies in intensity. It's fast, of course, but it's slow or mid-tempo for black metal. Only Three Steps Beyond the Horizon has frenetic blastbeats to help generate a wall of sound. It sounds great, but it feels extreme given the pace the guitars and drums take elsewhere on the album. Given that it provides an even greater contrast, I do wonder why Almach didn't take that approach more often.

While I keep questioning the authenticity of this, because it really does sound like I wandered into a public park and discovered a performance by Islamic folk musicians, only for a fully electric black metal band to start up under the next ramada over, with the two weirdly compatible and with one rarely drowning out the other, I like it a lot. The most obvious negative for me is the keyboards on early songs like Wolf, which sound simplistic and obvious, as if they'd taught me a three note motif and suddenly I'm in the band like Mr. Bean was in the London Symphony Orchestra at the Olympics in London. Hey, I completed a level on Guitar Hero yesterday. I'm a musician, right?

I should add that Ritual feels out of place. Everything here is middle eastern and Islamic, from the instrumentation to the melodies, except for Ritual, which mostly feels Celtic. It's driven by violin, soft piano and eventually harp, with soft female vocalisations that feel less like call to prayer and more like Enya covering Dead Can Dance. Or vice versa. It sounds pretty good, but it sounds like a song from another album, one recorded by a band who aren't from Afghanistan.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter where Almach are from. I could imagine them turning out to be one white dude in a basement in Inverness creating something he feels sounds interesting, a thought I'd echo. I could also imagine this being one Afghani with a sizeable collection of folk CDs and a love for the local sounds of Kabul, releasing four albums in four years without ever leaving his house, plus a couple of EPs. Either way, it feels to me like it's one multi-instrumentalist and I'm impressed by his originality.

Blut aus Nord - Lovecraftian Echoes (2022)

Country: France
Style: Atmospheric Black Metal/Dark Ambient
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 20 May 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Wikipedia | YouTube

I don't believe I've heard Blut aus Nord before, but I'm fascinated now, because this is unlike what I expected to hear from something labeled atmospheric black metal. Stereogum ranked this as the Best Metal Album of 2022, while Pop Matters and Invisible Oranges included the same band's new album for 2022, Disharmonium: Undreamable Abysses, in their end of year lists too. I checked that out and it's quite the sonic experience, but decided to review this one because of that number one status and because it's not the typical album in almost any regard.

For a start, it's not their new album because it's a compilation, but not of tracks previously issued on a variety of back catalogue items, as you might expect. The six tracks on offer are all relatively new, the oldest dating back to April 2021 and the newest from February 2022, so it's definitely last year's scope, and they were previously released to a subscriber-only forum called Order of Outer Sounds, so haven't been widely heard. Not that an album this unusual is going to be widely heard anyway, but you get the point. So, disclaimers aside, it's a new album in almost every sense, even if it isn't "the new Blut aus Nord" album, which is worth me diving into it.

This is definitely sourced in black metal, that recognisable wall of sound pivotal to the black metal experience, and it's dripping with atmosphere, but this is a long way from the typical atmospheric black metal bands out there, like Saor or Wolves in the Throne Room. It's dark and haunting and I find it easy to imagine as ambient but not of our dimension. To play into the Lovecraftian themes I see riddled throughout their work, this is the music of the spheres when they're occupied by elder gods. It's vast but it's claustrophobic and it pulls at our sanity. It's dangerously beautiful stuff, an enticing nightmare conjured out of sound.

As you might imagine, it's highly unorthodox and worthy of comparison to dark ambient designers of sound like Coil, Lustmord and Current 93 just as to anything in the black metal genre, even if we shimmy way over to the edge to avant-garde outfits like Oranssi Pazuzu or Neptunian Maximalism. As these are clearly soundscapes more than they are songs, with any vocals submerged so deeply that they might be something else entirely, it wouldn't be unfair to throw out comparisons to such powerelectronics legends as Merzbow either. It's clearly music to read about in both Kerrang! and Wire and that's always the most interesting music.

Nyarlathotep opens things up in uncompromising fashion and it's a complex and fascinating track that washes over us like a waterfall of tentacles with razorblade suckers, but Hypnos, which keeps on in the same vein, adds another level. Suddenly, we've become the waterfall and the six minute descent is not simply through air. There are undefinable creatures sharing this space with us and they're shrugging o our presence because we aren't worthy of their notice. This is a majestic piece of music and an evocative one, but it's also one I'm wary of visualising because I think it would give me motion sickness, especially late on when things get more frantic and jazzy.

These six tracks progress in such a consistent fashion, one flowing into the next, so it's difficult to see this in any way other than a single thirty-five minute composition, Maybe there's more in the way of guttural churning in The Tomb or The Abyss Between the Stars, but I lost track. I threw this on headphones because my speakers simply weren't doing it justice and let the album flood over me. After a couple of times through and a revisit to a couple of tracks to try to discern what they'd provide in isolation, I actually took a break to come to terms with the enormity of this music.

It's absolutely not going to be for everyone. This would sound awful on FM radio. It requires a slice of dedicated time, a good pair of headphones and an open mind. Switching the lights off ought to help too. If you have all of that ready, give this a go and see if it'll blow your mind too.

And, if it does, like me, you can dive into what else the band has been up to over the years, as they aren't remotely new. Blut aus Nord was formed back in 1994 in Normandy, France, initially as a one man project for Vindsval, still their vocalist and guitarist. W. D. Feld joined on drums and a variety of electronic contributions, not just keyboards, a year later and Ghöst added bass in 2003. Unless I miscounted, this comes after their fourteenth studio album as a kinda sorta fifteenth, and I see an array of EPs in there too. The've been busy and, based on these two 2022 albums, I'm eager to see where this easy listening for elder gods sound came from.

Saor - Origins (2022)

Country: UK
Style: Atmospheric Folk/Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Jun 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Saor's fourth album, Forgotten Paths, was one of the earliest albums that I reviewed here, when I had only just started up Apocalypse Later Music in 2019, and it was an eye-opener for me, because it demonstrated to me that black metal, which I was aware of as a relatively confined genre with a penchant for shrieked vocals, frantic drums and wall of sound guitars, was far more versatile than I thought. The past four years have taught me that, on the contrary, it's one of the most malleable genres out there, bands like Katharos XIII, Oranssi Pazuzu and Cân Bardd taking it into all sorts of places I never expected it to go: jazz, psychedelia and folk respectively.

Now, I'm playing up my ignorance a little much there, but I remember well the early rivalries that pitted black metal against death and thrash that were only trumped by metal vs. glam. It was not seen as appropriate to defect to a different camp or, crucially, to be in more than one at the same time. I knew intellectually in 2019 that those times were mostly gone, thank goodness, but it's fair to say that Saor helped me realise not that genres could merge but that it was already happening to a serious degree, because this is as much folk metal as it is black metal and it would be almost a heresy to attempt to separate them.

This fifth album does a similar job to its predecessor in merging those two genres, enough that I'd know precisely where Andy Marshall, the one man behind this project, hailed from even if I hadn't looked it up first. Maybe I wouldn't have been able to identify that from the opening track, Call of the Carnyx, though there are firm hints, but I wouldn't have any doubt by the time Fallen wraps up five minutes later. The last minute and a half is certainly black metal, blistering along at a serious clip, but it's also unmistakably a Celtic jig. The title track that wraps up the album returns to this a great deal, so it's there fresh in mind when the whole thing ends too.

And, once we've heard it, it's never that far away. We might not recognise the folky melodies and rhythms in The Ancient Ones as Celtic if we were given that song and that task in isolation but, in the slot right after hearing Fallen, it's impossible to miss, especially halfway through when it finds a bagpipe-like drone or later when it adds a plaintive flute. Once we have the wide open spaces of Scotland in our minds, everything depicts them.

The Ancient Ones begins and ends quietly, with that flute. It fades out slowly behind wind, and I'm talking about the wind that shifts air around rather than wind instruments. The natural world and other outdoor sounds are a frequent element here. Fallen begins with a crackling fire, Aurora with a heartbeat, Beyond the Wall with a storm. There was even more of this on Forgotten Paths and it lasted longer too, leading me to suggest two primary tones of pastoral and aggressive. That holds here, but there are fewer and shorter pastoral sections and more aggression. It's a heavier album and perhaps an angrier one. The choice of cover art reflects that too.

It's not entirely dark though. Even a song like Aurora, very possibly my favourite track here, which starts out angry and aggressive, calms down at points. It's like most of the song unfolds under an impressively dark and overcast sky but the clouds clear and the sun shines through at points, with a massive effect on the mood of the track. Beyond the Wall, which starts with a storm, does much the same thing and with similar quality, the primary difference being the tantalising presence of a guest female voice, initially as ghostlike whispers and later as a harmonising partner.

I like this album and I liked the previous one too, but I'm not sure which I prefer. I like the heavier, more aggressive feel, but I also wanted longer pastoral sections, so I'm in two minds. Other than that, it's very consistent with Forgotten Paths, with few things standing out for special notice. The one I will comment on is the bass on Aurora, which kicks in early and reminds of Peter Hook's work for Joy Division. I dug that a lot, maybe as much as I dug the monk-like choral chants on the same song. So perhaps I like this as much as last time but not more, so it's another reliable album from a busy musician.

Pure Wrath - Hymn to the Woeful Hearts (2022)

Country: Indonesia
Style: Atmospheric Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 18 Feb 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

I had an absolute blast with The Forlorn Soldier, technically an EP by Pure Wrath but one that was long enough to think of as an album. It was my runner up for Album of the Month in March of that year, nudging out the excellent Ghost Toast and My Dying Bride albums but losing out to the new Harem Scarem. Well, Januaryo Hardy, the man behind this project, is back with an full album, his third such as Pure Wrath, with a live album, that 2020 EP and a split release with Onirism available on Bandcamp too. I haven't heard most of that, but I really should carve out time to dig into it.

Januaryo is responsible for the vast majority of what's here, providing the vocals and most of the instrumentation, including guitar, bass and synths. He's also the songwriter, lyricist and, I expect, producer. He doesn't play the drums, which are, as last time out, the work of Yurii Kononov, an ex-drummer for White Ward. Also returning from that EP is Dice Midyanti to contribute piano, cello and "additional elements", whatever they are. Certainly, there's plenty of atmosphere within this atmospheric black metal, so I expect Midyanti is responsible for some of that.

Both are obvious from the outset, Midyanti's cello there as The Cloak of Disquiet kicks things into motion, an elegant sway in companionship with acoustic guitar, before the electrics take over and take over hard, Kononov's frantic drumming setting the pace. Suddenly, we're in full black metal onslaught, albeit with a slow sweeping melody floating through that wall of sound. There perhaps aren't as many dynamic shifts in this one as I'd have liked, but there are points where everything drops away for a slower section for texture.

Certainly, there's some elegant piano work to wrap up Years of Silence, alongside an odd shaking sound that's both enticing and creepy, like a bundle of rushes being beaten against a stone floor. That piano had already made a major effect in the song, minimal but very noticeable tinkling at a number of points. It's this song that also made the theme clear to me, which is grief, that piano an overt expression of such. Also, while the majority of the vocals phrase black metal shrieks as howls of anguish, there's a slower section midway that's dirge like, an outpouring of grief that wouldn't be out of place in a church, sans the music around it.

It's fair to say that I enjoyed this album through its first three tracks, and more on a second listen, but not as much as I enjoyed The Forlorn Soldier. Years of Silence is my pick from those three, even if Presages from a Restless Soul is a real grower of a song, but the streak of genius that was there last time out seemed to be missing. Well, it shows back up on Footprints of the Lost Child, because this is the Pure Wrath I was so impressed by on that EP.

It's strong from the outset, with an almost Iron Maiden melody under its wall of sound, while the vocals are a neatly creeping layer on top but the midsection is simply magnificent. In a subtle turn of mood, things got almost upbeat a couple of minutes in, as if the choral voices are celebrating a life rather than mourning a loss. It's at the five minute mark that it starts to steal our breath, with piano, cello, slow drums and whatever the other sound is merging into an inviting nest of comfort. The backing vocals as the song wraps are welcoming and comforting too. It's quite the piece and I'd have no hesitation calling it the standout track.

There are a couple more songs to come, Those Who Stand Still having some notable moments and Hymn to the Woeful Hearts being a very different closer, not a black metal song at all, more of a respite from the pain and grief inherent in everything thus far. It's almost like the album up to this point is a musical interpretation of all the heartbreak hidden (or not so hidden) by the attendees at an emotional service for the lost, with the title track the peaceful instrumental played as everyone's filing out to rejoin their lives. There's a guest here, Nick Kushnir on "guitar elements", but I don't know what that really means.

So, more powerful and thoughtful stuff from Januaryo Hardy. I'm not convinced that this is quite up to the standard of The Forlorn Soldier, but it's really good stuff and, when it's at its peak, with Footprints of the Lost Child, it's magnificent.

Wolves in the Throne Room - Primordial Arcana (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Atmospheric Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Aug 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Twitter | YouTube

Here's another album by a favourite band that I completely failed to notice in 2021, Wolves in the Throne Room being easily my favourite American black metal band of any description. Quite how we're supposed to describe them properly, I have no idea, because atmospheric black metal is an attempt at a start only, rather than a full definition of their genre. Whatever they play, they play it in original fashion and I've been a big fan ever since their second album, Two Hunters, blew me away in 2007.

Mountain Magick starts this one out as I'd expect from the band, not with the full on wall of sound black metal approach they do so well but with the generation of unique atmosphere that they do even better. Those are synths to kick off, assembled rather than played, and unusual rhythms and sounds that immediately take us outside and into the wilds. When Aaron Weaver's drums ramp up to full speed, the guitars find a much slower melody and we float intensely, a feeling I often get on Wolves in the Throne Room albums.

I liked this opener and I liked Spirit of Lightning more, especially with its rhythmic strings that are reminiscent of the koto, but neither song blew me away and nothing did until Underworld Aurora five tracks in. Sure, I dug the sheer power on offer in Primal Chasm (Gift of Fire), but I love Wolves in the Throne Room for their dynamics and the way they can find and mine grooves that turn into different grooves with such wildly different intensity that they boggle the mind. That shows up on Underworld Aurora.

I don't even know what's in play early in this piece—breaking glass? Native American flutes?—but the first couple of minutes could be taken from a Dead Can Dance album before, blink and you'll miss it, they suddenly flow into a black metal song. This is sonic weaving at its subtlest and it goes back and forth. As the piece builds, it also finds a majestic sweep, something that this band are a dab hand at. It's only seven minute long, hardly a lengthy piece for them, but it feels epic, furious drums frantic under a melody that soars free of every concern in the world, most of which seem to be packed into the final few moments.

There's only one true epic here and that's next, because Masters of Rain and Storm clocks in at an effortless eleven minutes. It actually gets really down and dirty, an old school proto-extreme riff I could imagine on an early Bathory album emerging from the frenzy, though it re-immerses itself pretty quickly. This one starts fast and stays there for a while, but it eventually finds that majestic sweep after a few minutes. It also drops down into an acoustic section and shifts gears again late. It does a lot of things, as Wolves in the Throne Room songs often do, though this one hasn't found its way under my skin yet. It may well do yet.

Oddly, I think my favourite piece here other than Underworld Aurora, which stands out more and more each time I listen through, is Eostre, and that's really just a three minute interlude after an epic to get us ready for the closer, Skyclad Passage. There's not much to Eostre but it's beautifully done, an enticing pastoral soundscape as much as Skyclad Passage is a warning of a soundscape, a soundtrack to a folk horror movie that's just entering the woods.

And so this is a good album but not a great one, I think. It has moments that show the magic that the Weaver brothers are known for, but it doesn't have as many as I'd like. It still has that sense of place that the band have always had, what they call Cascadian black metal but which is really just a blend of the older European styles with ambient and folk elements, along with a heck of a lot of patience. This still sounds like Wolves in the Throne Room above any other comparison and I'm up for any new material by this band. I wanted more from this one though.

Basarabian Hills - The Path of Hope (2021)

Country: Moldova
Style: Atmospheric Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Nov 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | VK | YouTube

I don't know where the Basarabian Hills are supposed to be, but I'm guessing they're conjured up from the imagination of the gentleman who goes by Spirit of the Forest and performs everything on Basarabian Hills releases. There are a bunch of these going back to two albums in 2012. I think this is the fifth since then for seven overall, plus a 2016 EP called Attraction, and Mr. Forest seems to have had a thing for the ten minute mark for quite a while. Nothing wraps up sooner than that until album four, 2014's Groping in a Misty Spread, and the four tracks on Stillness of the Codrii in 2013 each ran for exactly that long and not a second less or more.

This one follows his more recent trend of tracks that are long but not quite that long. The four on this album sit in the eight or nine minute range, though the title track very much appears in two separate movements that could easily have been labelled as two separate pieces of music because they seem to do completely different things.

The first sets an outdoor scene with a windy, foggy, atmospheric background, then casts sheets of keyboards against it like rain and then adds a layer of keyboards that chime like bells. That might suggest a Mike Oldfield comparison but that's only partly fair, as this sounds more like a carillon than tubular bells. And, while we might enjoy the melodies that are happening in the foreground (and I do), I get the impression that the background is much more important. This is about setting moods and whoever or whatever those melodies represent is a tiny creature indeed against the vast background that looms behind. And that's the black metal aspect in this atmospheric black metal sound.

Talking of which, there are blastbeasts to introduce the second movement, which is sweeping and regal, as if those melodies have gained power and are processing. Maybe that's why this pair put together are The Path of Hope, because however bleak the situation, it can evolve and grow and end happily. I should mention here that the blastbeats don't continue (though they do reappear as needed), so interested listeners are advised that the "atmospheric" in the atmospheric black genre label is a thousand times more important than the "black metal" component.

I could argue that Stuck in Desolation, title notwithstanding, doesn't shift too far away from the formula that The Path of Hope defined, but I think I like it more. It's clearly one track that's more cohesive and the bell like keyboards are even more melodious and engaging. I could imagine that on this one they're the communications of some alien race that we can't understand but is trying to get their point across to us anyway. They're still trying as we fade out eight and a half minutes in.

I think it's important for atmospheric black metal albums and, to be more expansive, pretty much any instrumental albums, to invoke other senses than just hearing. We don't have to see what the composer saw when he created this music, but we should see or taste or somehow feel something. When I don't, I feel that those albums have failed and are just musical notes strung together. This definitely takes me somewhere and it's telling that each track took me somewhere different. That tells me that this is a success. Another reason for that is that, even though this can be considered cinematic music, it never fell into the background for me, even on repeat listens.

I think Stuck in Desolation is my favourite track here, but From the Depth of Another Realm comes close because it builds really well. Into the Unending Darkness plays well too, even though I got an opposite reaction to it. It feels to me like we've wandered through the unending darkness until we actually found the end and the second half is us walking out into the light, joyous from unexpected discovery. I wondered earlier in the album if The Path of Hope should have wrapped things up but no, Into the Unending Darkness does the same job even better.

I still smile at how black metal, often the bleakest and harshest subgenre of metal, if we choose to ignore powerelectronics, has somehow spawned a host of subgenres that are melodious, calming, even ambient. This is half an hour plus of electronic atmosphere, far from its black metal roots, if not so far we can't see that beginning. And it's good stuff if you're in that mood.

PS: Yes, that has to be the most over the top black metal logo of all time and that's saying something.

And Now the Owls are Smiling - Dirges (2021)

Country: UK
Style: Atmospheric Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 29 Jan 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

I've heard a lot of good things about And Now the Owls are Smiling, yet another one man atmospheric black metal project, this time from the wilds of Norfolk. The one man goes by Nre, so he probably has the same name as me, merely two counties up from where I was born. Of course, he's able to play a lot of different instruments, not least everything on this album, while I can only play the fool, so he has the edge on me there.

Nre plays his atmospheric black metal with a strong side of depression. The eight numbered dirges on this album apparently follow stages of depression, from initial grief all the way to death and beyond. I caught the depressive tone, not least because Nre's vocal approach is mostly to scream into the void at the unfairness of existence, but was unable to catch any sort of progression. Maybe it's there in the lyrics which are not just unintelligible but often buried so far beneath the instrumentation that I was sometimes trying to confirm to myself that vocals were happening.

I can buy into that approach, even if it seems odd. Maybe the character Nre is portraying through the cycle of depression feels that he's not being heard and that lack of acknowledgement of his suffering is fuelling further depression. I don't know if that's a deliberate decision on Nre's part or whether it's me rationalising it, but it seems to work on that level. I wonder how some of my friends who suffer from various forms of depression would see this.

What I struggled with was the fact that most of the music here sounds acutely similar. That howl into the void sits just underneath a sound that's almost entirely the same combo of hyperspeed blastbeats and full speed guitar, with a layer of oddly hopeful keyboards adding melody and texture. There's not much here that varies the tempo or indeed that sound. There are some atmospheric intros and outros and three of the dirges are short and peaceful interludes. That's the bookends, Grief, a strong opener which mixes waves with a drummed heartbeat and a choral drone, and Ascension, which is the ray of hope the album needed to end with, plus Lucidity, which is a welcome pause in the intensity.

In fact, this gets so samey that the standout tracks for me almost automatically become those with at least a little will to change things up a little. Much of Pointlessness throws out the same sound we've been listening to all along, but there are slower sections and, given the high emotional content here, that lends it some poignancy. Acceptance is slower, which is almost shocking at this point, but it's still of a consistent pace and sound throughout, so it's like the other songs but at a third of the tempo.

The twist to those rare moments of variety is that they also serve to highlight how little of it there is here, so those are double-edged swords of songs. I wonder how many times the critics who have raved about this album, the third from Nre and And Now the Owls are Smiling, have actually listened to it. I can't say I didn't like the sound that's conjured up here as it's a good sound, but I'd have appreciated the album more if there had been a second sound too and a third and a fourth.

Yoth Iria - As the Flame Withers (2021)

Country: Atmospheric Black Metal
Style: Greece
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Jan 2021
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Yoth Iria is a new band, formed in 2019, and this is their debut album, but the two men involved have quite the history in Greek extreme music and black metal in particular. Bassist Jim Mutilator was one of the co-founders of Rotting Christ, back when they played grindcore, and he remained with them for a decade. He also co-founded Varathron and was part of their line-up for their first five years, but he's been gone from the scene for a long time, as a musician at least. The vocalist known here as the Magus was also in Rotting Christ, as well as Necromantia and Thou Art Lord, among many others.

All of which means that it's really not surprising when The Great Hunter is a decent opener. It's heavy and fast and black with a doomy drone in the midsection. It's nothing outrageous or innovative but it ably demonstrates that these folks still have it, even if they haven't been using it for a while. It's Yoth Iria, though, the second song, that really made my attention perk up. This one isn't heavy and fast and black, at least not in the way that we're expecting after that opener.

It's more interesting from moment one, with a vaguely middle eastern intro that defines the song, as that theme permeates the song, shifting from instrument. It heavies up, but never gets fast and never gets particularly black either, except for the commanding voice of the Magus, which is an archetypal black shriek and very consistent, whatever his tone. He narrates and chants and shrieks, with massive amounts of intonation, but it's all in done in that beautifully evil voice. I love the outro too, which is a gradually decreasing thing, dropping to bass and keyboards and then just those pulsing keyboards from guest musician John Patsouris.

And so we realise that this isn't just the decent new black metal album from a couple of old names. It's an album rooted in black metal that experiments to see what else they can do with the genre. It plays in doom, without getting weighty and oppressive, but also in traditional heavy metal, folk and gothic metal too.

For instance, while I can't particularly quantify it, I continually felt during Yoth Iria like I was hearing an Iron Maiden song translated into another genre. I think it's the storytelling style. Hermetic Code starts out with a riff worthy of Satyricon in their heavy metal days, but it becomes very folky during a dramatic black metal midsection and during the outro. That midsection also features those Patsouris keyboards elevating this music once more, and they're a constant reminder here that we're listening to something beyond pure black metal.

The Mantis builds on the Magus's narrative style in Yoth Iria and the midsection of Hermetic Code to get even more dramatic, with choir effects layered in for emphasis. By this point, it feels like there's something visual going on that I should be watching while I'm listening, like this is a soundtrack to a black metal opera. Again, though, the black is mostly in the vocals, the Magus stalking the stage in an impressive costume dominating our attention with the swagger of an Alice Cooper (or the god on the album cover), while the music is traditional in a Mercyful Fate vein.

The Red Crown Turns Black is faster and more traditional atmospheric black metal, though it doesn't quite become a wall of sound and it continues to expand beyond its genre, ending with more of those reminders of Iron Maiden, even though it features particularly galloping drums from JV Maelstrom, another guest musician, who was in Thou Art Lord with the Magus. The other guest that I've skipped over thus far is George Emmanuel of Lucifer's Child, who played guitar live with Rotting Christ for a majority of the previous decade.

I've run through each song thus far because they're all different and interesting in their way. Unborn Undead Eternal continues that, with a gothic feel laid over Celtic Frost bedrock, something that flows less notably into Tyrants, which at seven tracks into eight is the first song not to do anything new on this album, if we exclude the industrial effects at the very end. And that leaves The Luciferian to wrap up the album and that does quite a lot, even if it's the least engaging song for me.

So I'm not going to put down the bookends but they vanish on me. Every time I listen through, I get re-engaged by Yoth Iria and stay captivated until the end of Unborn Undead Eternal, at which point I drift away. That half hour in the middle is fascinating and 8/10 for sure. With the rest put back in, it's still a solid 7/10 from me.

The Ruins of Beverast - The Thule Grimoires (2021)

Country: Germany
Style: Atmospheric Black/Doom Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 30 Jan 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Wikipedia

I haven't encountered the work of Alexander von Meilenwald before, but he's been around for a while and has a pair of active projects. He's the drummer in a black/death metal band called Truppensturm, who have released a couple of albums since 2006 and he's the founder and sole member of this project which is now on its sixth album since 2003. It's labelled atmospheric black/doom metal, but it appears to me like he takes that very much as a starting point rather than a boundary.

It's ambitious stuff, this album running close to seventy minutes but featuring only seven songs, with three of those lasting into double digits. I'm assuming that it's a concept album or at least a thematic collection of songs that revolve around strange magical goings on at the end of the earth. The Greeks and Romans saw Thule as the location farthest north, while grimoires are books of spells. Put the two components together and this album certainly feels like it's introducing us to unseen places that can be found on no maps.

I liked the opener, Ropes into Eden, immediately. It's an engaging piece, whose minute and half intro of oscillating guitar grabs our attention and makes us wonder where the song is going to take us. It's quite the ride, at points an almost ritual storytelling chant and at others a dramatic narrative played out in front of an eerie and atmospheric backdrop. It ought to grab any fan of extreme metal not as a mere exercise in brutality but a mechanism to create weird art.

However, I liked the next song so much more that it sold me on the album all on its own. If Ropes into Eden told me a strange story, The Tundra Shines grabbed me through the magic of technology and let me be part of it. Everything about this one speaks to me, from its outré whalesong opening through a doomy deliberation punctuated with cultlike celebrations to a sort of spiritual conversation. A ritual beat keeps us grounded while everything else going on takes us on a bizarre journey. And there's a lot going on. It lasts eleven minutes and I immersed myself in it a few times before allowing the album to move onward.

And that's just the first twenty-five minutes. These two epics give way to a set of shorter songs, where shorter here means six to nine minutes each, that weren't as immediate to me but which grow well on repeat listens. One thing I realised exploring these shorter songs is just how good the drum sound is on this album. I'd enjoyed it on The Tundra Shines, whether fast and urgent or slow and resonant, but there's percussion like whips on Mammothpolis and that highlights how crystal clear the beats are in these songs and how beautifully each of them transitions into silence.

What else struck me is how far this drifts from its black metal roots. There's definitely black metal on this album, in abundance, and there's plenty of doom too, but this weaves its inexorable way into the less usual genres of gothic rock, post-punk and even new wave. It's never less than heavy, but this is a very different way forward from the avant-garde genre mashing of Celtic Frost than I've heard before. There are points where this album, which would have been an unimaginable thing in the early British eighties, touches on Bauhaus and Depeche Mode and other names I wouldn't expect to cite here.

The variety in vocal styles helps too. Quite frankly, I got far too immersed in this to quantify any sort of break down between them, but a lot of this is harsh in a blackened death sort of way, while a lot of it is clean and resonant in more of a gothic vein. There are spoken word sections too, which only add a level of drama to music that's inherently dramatic anyway. While I'm only seeing Michael Zech's name credited on a variety of odd instruments, like Jew's harp and EBow, along with effects, so I'm unaware of who the female vocalists are, but there's a middle eastern voice on Anchoress in Furs and a distant echoing soprano on Deserts to Bind and Defeat. Maybe they're samples.

I'm already rating this highly, but I need to throw this onto headphones and listen in the dark in the middle of the night, because I think it may merit more than an already highly recommended 8/10.

Pure Wrath - The Forlorn Soldier (2020)

Country: Indonesia
Style: Atmospheric Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
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Pure Wrath is another one man project, this time from Indonesia, and the one man is Januaryo Hardy, who does everything here except the drums, which come courtesy of Yurii Kononov, formerly of White Ward and currently of a host of varied bands, and the piano on the opening track, which is by Dice Midyanti. It's Hardy's fourth release as Pure Wrath, following two albums and a split release with French symphonic black metal band Onirism, and it counts as an EP, even though it generously runs almost half an hour.

It's also very good indeed. I've listened through a few times and every time it shocks me by ending so quickly and I realise all over again just how much it sucked me in. There are only three songs on offer, ranging from seven up to ten minutes, but they're so immersive that they feel like five apiece. If I have a complaint, it's in the mix of the drums, which are excellent but a little buried in the mix. The piano works well down there, because it teases and we pay extra attention to hear it. The vocals are buried to exactly the right level too, but I'd have liked a crisper drum sound.

The piano gets overt at the end of When a Great Man Dies, underpinning what I presume is a voice sample of someone who was involved in or affected by the subject of the album, which is the genocide that began in Indonesia in 1965 as an anti-communist purge after a failed coup and became so much more, leaving a million dead and setting up the New Order of Suharto in power for the next three decades. Maybe it's a late recording of Sukarno, the deposed president, who was placed into house arrest until his death.

I've read that this bloody period is little talked about in Indonesia, due to being suppressed by the government, so it's good for it to see a little light on this album, even if I have no idea what the lyrics happen to be. I did catch odd bits here and there, enough to believe that they're delivered in English but not enough to have a clue about what they cover. I'd like to read those lyrics, just as I'd like to know who's speaking in that sample.

Atmospheric black metal is a fantastic genre to explore this sort of subject matter. hardy and Kononov create a powerful wall of sound that's impossible to ignore, just like the mass murder of one per cent of the population would be. It's hard and mostly fast until, at certain key moments like one midway through With Their Names Engraved, it all suddenly stops and we're calm in the eye of the storm wondering what's still going on out there while it's so peaceful here inside. After that moment of peace, the last couple of minutes are melancholy, with an almost choral dirge, as we come to terms with what's just happened.

What impressed me most, beyond this structuring, is how the guitars retain a melodic line even at ludicrous speed. One of the benefits of being a one man band is that every part you play has to be recorded separately and, once you get into that mindset, it's no great stretch to add further layers. As this album has such a dense sound, I can't say how many guitar layers Hardy added but much of the album obviously features a backing layer to maintain density and a lead layer for surprisingly patient melodic riffing.

I liked this a lot on a first listen and I liked it all the more after a few times through. I look forward to seeing what else Hardy has done, whether as Pure Wrath or one of his many other bands. He also provides everything for a brutal death project called Perverted Dexterity and a post-black one called Lament, among a host of others. He shows a lot of versatility here and that is never a bad thing when you play in multiple genres.

Abigail Williams - Walk Beyond the Dark (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Atmospheric Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Nov 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Wikipedia

Of all the many subgenres within heavy metal nowadays, I'm starting to grasp that atmospheric black metal is one of the most versatile. That's because it isn't really one sound, it's a combination of two very different sounds, the harsh of black metal with its blastbeats and shrieks and the soft of melodic ambience that often sets a scene. The key is that the balance between these two ingredients can be shifted either way to any degree.

Abigail Williams does much the same thing as Saor, another fundamentally one man band, but with a wildly different effect because the two bands mix those two ingredients very differently. Saor play up the atmosphere, so whisking me away to the Scottish highlands, where I stay even when their harsher side kicks in. Abigail Williams play their black metal fast and brutal, with the atmosphere layered in.

They (by which I mean mainstay Ken Sorceron and the musicians he brought in for this album) try to resist dipping into atmosphere at other points but I think they fail more often than they think they do. Fortunately, they do it very well indeed. The introductory few minutes to Black Waves are delightful and the outro to Born of Nothing, which segues nicely into the intro of the closing track, The Final Failure, is pretty damn good too.

It's also neatly different. Most bands dipping into atmospheric black metal use synths to conjure up their atmosphere with maybe some ambient samples. Sorceron, on the other hand, hired a cellist called Christopher Brown, who goes by Kakophonix when playing black metal for bands like Empyrean Throne, Black Reaper and Through the Thorns, not to mention his own "black ritual chamber musick project", Hvile I Kaos, which will release an album called Black Morning, Winter Green in a couple of weeks.

Like any atmospheric black metal, this is music to immerse yourself into and I haven't given this the 3am headphones in the dark treatment yet. I'm sure I will because I like it rather a lot and I'm delaying the next album on my list because I keep replaying it. The songs trend long, two of the seven on offer coming close to eleven minutes each, but they're more effectively seen as classical compositions with titles changed to things like Op. No. 7 with Blastbeats and Shrieks.

I'm particularly interested in how much the cello will emerge in the dark. I found that it became more and more prominent as the album ran on. It doesn't show up until a couple of minutes into I Will Depart and it sounds more like an exotic guitar solo with the music hardly slowing down to acknowledge it. The more I listen, the more I hear cello lurking underneath everything else adding to the textures, but the opening songs aren't too atmospheric.

By the middle track, Black Waves, it's impossible not to notice because it's up front and centre. By the last, The Final Failure, it's dominant. I wonder if this is because the guest guitarists are restricted to the opening twenty minutes, which means only three songs. Atmosphere on them is evoked more by competing shrieks or sections of almost tribal drumming. The point at which I heard the cover art most was the moment midway through Sun and Moon where the tumult drops to just tribal drumming and an ominous bass.

There's some good stuff in the first half, especially on Sun and Moon, but the album comes alive for me with the eerie intro to Black Waves and refuses to let me go after that. That's almost appropriate for a band named for the girl whose claims (with those of her cousin) helped to start the Salem witch hunts and refused to let the people of Massachusetts go. What did go was Ken Sorceron, who used to be a local here in Phoenix, but he moved to New York, then Los Angeles and is now based out of Olympia, WA, which sadly makes it a little harder for me to see him live.

Triste Terre - Grand œuvre (2019)

Country: France
Style: Atmospheric Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 15 Mar 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

This is the first full album from Triste Terre, a French atmospheric black metal band from Lyon, and I haven't heard any of their previous EPs but, on the basis of this alone, I'm sold on their particular take on the genre.

In fact, Grand œuvre is precisely what I look for in black metal nowadays, a set of immersive songs that run long and complex. There are half a dozen on offer here and they range from nine minutes to well over twelve, so there's plenty of opportunity for two permanent band members and their guest drummer to create walls of engaging sound that are impermeable until we persevere to discover the delights within.

I really don't want to use the word "routine" but, on first listen, this is relatively typical of the genre, just done capably and enjoyably. The beat, courtesy of session drummer Lohengrin, is slow but the blastbeats behind it are often as fast as we'd expect. A gentleman by the name of Naâl provides most of the rest of the instrumentation, including the keyboards that help to create that dense background. He handles the vocals too.

I say "most" as there's another musician here, A. Varenne on contrabass, an interesting choice for a black metal album and that's the beginning of what starts to creep out of that 'routine' sound to highlight just how far from it this album is. Four minutes and change into Nobles luminaires, Varenne's contrabass gets playful. Suddenly we're listening to Satan's lounge band, a delightful bass run underneath the dissonant, clashing guitars and, before too long, the blastbeats.

There are certainly some surprises on offer here and a second run through highlights some of them nicely.

For instance, the opening track, Œuvre au noir, has quite a few of them. An old school church organ shows up here and there and makes itself at home in no time flat. Lohengrin does vary his drumming, with one particular military rhythm standing out for notice. And, if Naâl's vocals begin unremarkably, he does go high at points and that proves to be an elevation in more than just pitch.

In fact, when he does something different, he's a real highlight. On Corps glorieux, his voice gradually becomes more and more tortured until we have to wonder if he's performing from the stake with flames gradually creeping up to take him down. Early in Lueur émérite, he goes for a droning chant like a monk's. A few minutes later, he goes high again, with vibrato, like he's aiming for the nuns next door too. He's his own demonic choir when he wants to be.

As tends to be the case with more interesting black metal albums nowadays, I liked this on first listen but failed to catch much of what it's doing. It's a journey not a destination, so each return visit brings more and more into focus until, eventually, Grand œuvre may well become an old friend.

It's also a large enough friend to provide particular value. It could end after four tracks and still seem substantial at 42 minutes. Every accolade mentioned above would still apply. But wait, as they say, there's more! It isn't done, because there are two more ten minute plus tracks to bounce it over the hour mark.

This is definitely a candidate for three in the morning headphones, because interruptions are anathema to albums like this. Skip your virtual needle in half a song and see if it makes sense. It won't. This deserves for you to set an hour aside to immerse yourself into it like a virgin into a bath of blood. I can't say what my dreams will be like after such an immersion, not least because the final track, Tribut solennel, is as fast as the band get, but I'm willing to find out.

Saor - Forgotten Paths (2019)

Country: UK
Style: Atmospheric Folk/Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Feb 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

Now, this is interesting stuff. Yeah, it's atmospheric black metal with a pervasive folk influence, but it's much more than that suggests, rather in keeping with the band's name, as Saor is apparently Gaelic for "free" or "unconstrained". Their sound is very much their own and I'm not hearing constraints of any sort.

I say "band" but Saor is really a solo project of Andy Marshall, who has other solo projects to his credit too, such as Fuath and Askival, both of which have albums out. Each is still primarily the work of the one man, though there are guests on this album and the final track apparently has nothing to do with him, being written by two other people and performed by one of them.

I wonder what he was trying to do with this album. Both the title and the cover art from Atterigner suggest a number of different ways of thinking. Are the forgotten paths he aims to highlight physical paths, through the forests of Scotland, as depicted so well in the evocative artwork? Are we talking about spiritual paths, as suggested by the prominence of the big horned skull in the foreground right next to the title? Perhaps the point is cultural paths, given the growing acknowledgement that Scotland is not England and frankly never was, even if they're both important parts of the UK. I have no idea and can only guess.

I've mentioned Scotland twice and, had I not known that Marshall is based in Glasgow, I'd have assumed that this was Scottish music anyway from the because of the folk melodies woven throughout. The bagpipes don't appear until the second track and they're not there for the usual reasons, being used as texture rather than as an overwhelming solo instrument. There's a flute that floats over a good deal of the title track and it couldn't have come from anywhere else.

Forgotten Paths, like the other two long tracks here, invites us to sit back and interpret what Marshall is trying to tell us. There are sections performed at pace, with rapid black metal drums and an urgency that can't be denied, whether accompanied by vocals or not, though they tend to also feature overt melodies soaring above them; there are contemplative parts, which often drop down to solo piano or soft guitar over drums; and there are sections that fall anywhere in between, each with its own flavour.

The primary two tones here are pastoral and aggressive, which is a pretty good way to describe Scotland. Marshall conjures up a selection of vistas which remind of a rural landscape that's beautiful and unspoilt but also often bleak and windswept. It's an environment that looks inviting and frankly is but it's also an environment full of dangers and which will happily fight you.

And there's that undertone too. The vocals tend to be gruff and are half buried in the mix, making them sound rather like the massed war cries of an approaching army tantalisingly on the other side of a hill or valley, just out of our sight. Even when we hear voices, the instruments are on top of them driving the music forward.

Battle often seems imminent here, even when all is calm. It feels like the calm before or, more frequently, after the storm, as the participants take stock of what went down and think about where to go next.

For all the folk sounds, I didn't get a sense of community here. There's no dancing and feasting and singing along together; this is nowhere near the more personal Viking metal style. The folk element is countryside and heritage and tradition, even when it's the clean guest vocals of Sophie Rogers on Bròn. This isn't music to listen to by the fire with a glass of whisky. It's music to listen to on the slopes of the Highlands with the wind and the trees joining in.

Vapor Hiemis - Чараўнiца cмерцi (2019)

Country: Belarus
Style: Black Industrial Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 17 Jan 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | YouTube

Here's an odd sound that grabbed my ear. Vapor Hiemis play pagan black metal but they're also either industrial or EDM, depending on the source, which translates to the fact that they have a programmed drum machine rather than a live drummer. They also have a band member who plays 'folk instruments', which is why this is often a folk metal album too. How it veers from EDM to folk metal is a wild trip and I'm still not sure how well it works.

It works well on the opener, Ад сонца прэч, with a driving beat, a crunchy bass and a lead bagpipe. The vocals vary from clean to harsh and it's only the slight distortion on the drums that lessens this a little. The title translates to Away from the Sun, which kind of works for an anti-folk song. The death folk approach hits its peak on the final track, Поўнач or North which adds a female folk vocal and I don't know how many folk instruments.

I dig the idea of death folk and Google Translate suggests that Чараўнiца cмерцi means either "death sorceress" or "fairy of the cemetery", depending on how I search. Either way, that's an enticing image to accompany the music and I soon found myself visualising the club scene in Blade with blood pouring from the sprinkler system as everyone feeds on the one unwitting victim.

I think I'd dig death folk more if there was a consistent sound here. The title track ditches the folk sound until late on and frankly ditches the industrial side too. The first half is classic black metal with appropriate shrieks and a sort of happy drinking song in the middle. The drum speed varies but hits some serious bpms at points. Only in the mid section does the wall of sound descend while the pipes of death wail. Then it's back to hyperspeed until a flute joins those pipes for the finalé.

The third track marks the wildest change to the sound, because it's when the EDM is ramped up, with Euro-disco hissing cymbals and a whoop of an electronic motif above and behind the crunch of the band. Maybe if the Prodigy had been born into the Norwegian black metal elite, they'd sound like this. Then again, maybe not. I was mostly intrigued by the idea of who might dance along to this.

Certainly I'm able to see the pit churning happily away but this is a lot more extreme stuff than anything Rammstein came up with. And always those flutes and/or pipes come back to provide the melody, like in the truest dance song, Памірае восень. That translates to Dying Fall so maybe it really is a moshing song.

By five songs in, I started to really wonder about Vapor Hiemis. Are they really a single band or is Vapor Hiemis Russian for "remix album"? While there are some commonalities throughout, these three tracks could easily have been the product of different remix artists messing with the black industrial base of a band who provide everything here but don't actually sound like this.

Maybe they're just that schizophrenic but the end result here feels like a band who play in different styles to different audiences but lumped all of that onto one disc and that decision will affect their potential audience. I dug some of their more folk metal oriented material, especially Поўнач, and didn't dislike their black metal onslaught tracks. I found myself surprisingly intrigued by the EDM stuff too but can't really say that it's my scene.

The point is that I don't know a lot of people who are into folk metal and black metal and EDM all at the same time. But hey, Vapor Hiemis have been releasing material since 2013 and this is their fourth album, so it's clear that there's an audience in Belarus for this. I applaud them for being their own band.

Moongates Guardian - The Last Ship (2019)

Country: Russia
Style: Atmospheric Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

J. R. R. Tolkien would have been 126 today, so I thought I'd take a look at The Last Ship by Moongates Guardian, the latest album from a Tolkien-obsessed pair of black metal musicians from Kaliningrad, who are nothing if not prolific.

In addition to singles and splits and EPs and what have you, Moongates Guardian have issued eight albums in only six years, if we include their full length tribute to Summoning. Now add in the five albums that this pair released as Holdaar during that same period and another one in 2018 under the banner of Regnat Horrendum and we can't help but wonder about the quality. Who can release that much material in that short a timeframe without some of it being unworthy?

Well, one benefit Moongates Guardian have is that they don't have to write too many lyrics, as their approach is to take poems from the works of Tolkien and set them to original music. I believe everything here was sourced from Tom Bombadil, though titles do change somewhat, occasionally to reflect the first lines of these poems rather than their titles, so The Hoard becomes When the Moon Was New and The Mewlips becomes The Shadows Where the Mewlips Dwell.

For an odd approach like this, it's decent enough stuff, a lot bouncier and far more keyboard driven than I expected. Kaliningrad is a Russian exclave that looks over the Baltic at Sweden and Vällingby, a suburb of Stockholm, is a straight shot across the water. I bring that up because it was the home of Quorthon, of Bathory fame. While this is ostensibly black metal, which Quorthon arguably created, it's done in an epic martial style that's perhaps just as influenced by the Viking metal that Bathory moved into.

What's more, all the instrumentation is the product of one man, Skilar by name, just as later Bathory albums were all Quorthon, whatever the instrument. Skilar's partner in crime here and elsewhere is Alexey, who provides the vocals and I believe that he layers his vocals to meet the need just as Skilar layers his instruments. The black metal vocals, which are relatively subdued, are more effective than the clean parts, as English is clearly not Alexey's first language. Good intonation can be tricky! He does a pretty good job for the most part but shines most in the sections that sound very much like a choir.

Skilar digs a lot deeper than the traditional black metal toolbox. Many instrumental parts dig into folk tunes, orchestrations and even ambient elements such as flowing water. The drums are often the only reason why this doesn't sound more like a movie soundtrack, but they add to the folk phrasing. On the Southern Spurs only features choral vocals, so it's a sort of instrumental and the drumming is more in the style of handheld drums than a kit.

I quite liked this album and, because the lyrics are never particularly clear to the listener, it works even for those who don't care a whit for the Tolkien connection. Of course, given the prevalence of Tolkien character or place names in extreme metal, it may be that there's a built-in Tolkien fanbase aching for albums like this to explore deeper than just names and actually interpret that author's poetic material. Stranger things have happened!