Negura Bunget’s Maiestrit doesn’t make it easy to accept the recent dissolution of the band’s original lineup. The final release from core members Hupogrammos, Negru and Sol Faur is a re-recording / re-imagining of the band’s 2000 release Maiastru Sfetnic, and while it stays pretty true to the original, it’s the small changes that make this Romanian horde’s mastery of atmospheric music so painfully evident. The band has carried the production values of Om onto this new recording, giving the songs on Maiestrit that same mysterious, majestic atmosphere that no other band has come close to duplicating. Occasional subtle tweaks to the songs like additional vocals or keyboards only serve to pull you deeper into the band’s world.

The band has described the original Maiastru Sfetnic “the purest black metal album we ever made,” which for these guys may be true, but Maiestrit is still not even close to typical black metal. The songs on Maiestrit are full of folk influences, weird sounds and textures, brilliantly executed tempo changes, and the epic and masterful songwriting that typifies Negura Bunget’s sound. The band flows between beautiful acoustic passages and swirling, dense black metal with ease on nearly every song, and as usual the superb drumming of Negru and Huppogrammos’s vocals perfectly complement the guitars and keyboards.

Included in the re-release are acoustic versions of two songs, ‘A-vînt în Abis’ and ‘Plecaciunea mortii’, which end up being enjoyably creepy yet very different from the original versions. Prophecy is also releasing a limited artbook edition of the album, which comes as a sleek 56-page hardback full of photos and art related to the album. Even without the new tracks and bonus materials though, Maiestrit is most definitely worth picking up whether you already own the previous version or not, as bands capable of constructing such masterfully epic, dark music like this don’t come around very often.

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