While it contains occasional passages reminiscent of the immersive, shoegaze-influenced sound of Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde, Alcest’s latest release Écailles de Lune feels more like a fusion of Neige’s styles in Alcest and other projects. Taking inspiration from the mysteriousness and expansiveness of the seas, Neige has crafted another emotional musical journey, but this one feels much colder and more ethereal than its predecessor.
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At first listen, it may seem like with Drifting Through the Void, Svarti Loghin are attempting to jump on the bandwagon of bands like Alcest, Amesoeurs or Lantlôs with their blend of black metal and elements of shoegaze and indie rock. And while certainly there are stylistic similarities between Svarti Loghin and those bands, this Swedish group have clearly carved out their own sound and are pushing the boundaries of black metal in a direction that is all their own.
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Aldaaron is yet another example of France’s ability to produce excellent black metal bands seemingly out of nowhere. Hailing from Grenoble in southeastern France near the French alps, Aldaaron mostly adheres to a formula that numerous other bands like Dissection or Belenos have used with much success, but instead of focusing on darkness or outright aggression, debut album Nous Reviendrons Immortels is infused with a melancholic sense of melody and a certain spiritual feel that differentiates it somewhat from other bands playing this style.
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Ptahil’s debut EP Ortus is close to 30 minutes of ritualistic, emotionally-scarring black metal dissonance fueled by Satanic Gnosticism. In other words, definitely something you wouldn’t expect to originate from the Midwestern United States. This trio from Fort Wayne, Indiana combines lyrics from ancient medieval sources with hypnotic black noise, the combined effect of which is to beat the listener’s consciousness into a state of meditative appreciation.
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Russian one-man black metal band Stielas Storhett returns nearly three years after releasing their excellent debut album Vandrer… with the new two-song EP Skd. Having been so long since the last release, it’s expected that Stielas Storhett’s sound would have gone through some changes and improvements, but I was definitely not prepared for how different this EP sounds from the debut.
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Finland’s Azaghal have been around for quite awhile, Teraphim being their eighth full-length album. Founding member Narqath, who handles contributes guitars and vocals, also later went on to form pagan black metal band Wyrd. On Teraphim the band displays a refined style of black metal that isn’t overly raw, aggressive or melodic, but contains a good balance of these elements.
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Death Obsession is the second full-length from Austin, Texas’s Brown Jenkins. These guys play black metal only in the loosest sense of the word, creating suffocating and entrancing atmospheric music that morphs and evolves organically without any semblance of structure. There is no warmth at all in Brown Jenkins’s sound on this album; the effect is one of utter hopelessness and paranoia, like dark forces swirling around you that are beyond your control.
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There’s a fine line in progressive black metal between augmenting the genre’s accepted aesthetic and completely destroying it, and Germany’s Semen Datura are straddling that line proudly on this release. The first actual song ‘Unter Bleigvanen Wolkenlasten’ includes some very traditional black metal elements, but even it has some weird touches. Things really start to get unusual on the fourth track ‘Mental Outlaw’ though - it begins with a creepy intro before suddenly breaking into kind of a blackened industrial beat. Semen Datura’s spastic songwriting is often unpredictable, but they’re good enough musicians that at least a lot of the time, the riffs they are moving between are pretty awesome ones, so the end result is a very entertaining album.
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The Ruins of Beverast’s last two albums were built on a foundation of dark and oppressive atmospheric black metal. The band’s latest release basically continues along those lines, which makes it easily better than what lots of bands these days are putting out. That said, I’m not sure I like the direction things are going.
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Only minutes into Monolith’s opener, it becomes clear that In Mourning is the type of band I tend not to like, with a genre-bending, progressive style tries that seems like it’s trying to pull numerous metal subgenres into one. ‘For You To Know’ changes constantly, starting off with an soft melody and then abruptly shifting into a start-stop riff with screamed metalcore-like vocals. It moves through a clean guitar passage, some melodic riffing, a middle passage reminiscent of Porcupine Tree, and some clean singing over the chorus.
As the album progresses however, it becomes evident that unlike most bands out there playing this kind of metal, In Mourning actually know what they’re doing.
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