Listening to this album, I only needed five minutes to discover just how incredibly saddening and dejected depressive BM can be in the hands of this duo who hail from from Krasnodar, one of the, er, sunnier cities in Russia. This is a very sad album indeed, though for reasons the guys might not have had in mind.

First track “Swallow” runs the emotional gamut from deep, deep sorrow to sheer panic and anguish, to the point where you feel more embarrassed for the histrionics and the background whimpering while the thin whiny guitars roar away and the drums flail continuously. It’s actually not a bad track, there’s plenty of good riffing but the overall sound is more wheezy than energetic and emphatic, and probably throws more weight onto the vocals and the hysteria than those deserve. “When Tears Become Bright Again” is not the happiest or brightest of songs either but for sheer pain and burning heat from those crumbly guitar tones this track can’t be beaten. There’s actually quite a good little bass melody going on in the far background if you can ignore the bleating and the screaming.

As the album progresses, I find paying attention to the instrumental music more rewarding than the complaining – if there was some way of erasing the vocals completely and just listening to the music, I’d do it. The contrasts between 5ml’s cleaner post-rock music and the battery-acid BM are very sharp and do much more to disorient and upset listeners than any amount of over-acting and the use of spoken-voice recordings do. 5ml can do moody blues music really well and should just let that continue for as long as they can stand because often that brooding, darkening moodiness is all that’s just needed to impress on listeners a state of unease and fear. The music also improves in the album’s second half with more emphasis on slower mood music and slightly less vocal theatrics.

The music ranges from fairly typical depressive BM with not very much atmosphere (except in the last track where there’s a bit of cold spacey-ness) to brooding urban mood post-rock, with better, more atmospheric music in the later tracks than earlier ones. Final track “Bath of Razors” attempts to integrate the depressive BM and post-rock tendencies more than on previous songs with some success in parts, with the addition of piano and synth-generated droning. Unfortunately those screechy voices are back as well and the music recedes to ongoing scratchiness and cold repetitive noodling.

After hearing this a few times, I find this album more so-so than it could have been: there’s some good emotional music here and if the duo had eliminated those annoying voices and concentrated on bulking up the music with better production, the album’s potential for deep soulful music could have been better realised. “Injection” does promise quite a lot in its first few moments and the album overall does deliver – but you sense it could have done so much more. Let’s hope a follow-up album can deliver a full booster to reinforce and strengthen the positive effects of “Injection” without the adverse reactions.

For a debut album, “Sistere” is a whopper at 72 minutes with the title track alone clocking in at 31 minutes. You’d expect Izah to have plenty to say to keep you all interested and for the most part they keep you busy and tuned in with their mix of dark urban blues ambient, sludge metal, hardcore and post-rock. Combined with a range of moods, mostly in the dark brooding end of the emotional spectrum which could spill into sudden anger and violence, this particular musical fusion makes for a recording of quite complicated soundscapes.

Opening track “Indefinite Instinct” is a gentle introduction into “Sistere” with post-rock melodies that steadily descend into a heavier, more monstrous sludge metal demon complete with distorted shouting voices and effects suggestive of mental and emotional fragmentation and breakdown. This leads into the aggressive death metal of “Duality” delving into passages of deep cavernous atmosphere and jangling guitars, or field recordings of multi-voiced speeches, and eventually turns into an epic post-rock sludge drama of despair and heartbreak. Yet threaded through this song is a tiny sliver of hope and light which keeps the whole track together and focused. “Finite Horizon” follows in a similar vein as the two preceding tracks: mixing melodic post-rock, hardcore and hard-driving, grinding sludge with clean vocals and spoken voice recordings into another anthem of giant proportions. While the music itself is very impressive as it builds towards its climax, the clean-toned choirboy-like singing is rather weak and its style is embarrassingly reminiscent of old 1970s hard rock US bands like Kansas and Styx. If there’s a song in the first half of the album that needs pruning, “Finite Horizon” most needs the secateurs.

At this point, most bands might consider that 41 minutes of music would be more than enough to introduce them to new audiences but Izah cruise ahead with a fourth song that’s three-quarters as long as the rest of the album.  The title piece is a melange of sorrowful post-rock, black metal, anguished rasping vocal, brooding atmospheres, spoken voice and other field recordings, epic doom rock, screechy noise and symphonic rock all united by a pessimistic vision and a relentless trudge towards what must be an apocalyptic climax. It could have been a long rambling mess but the song is very focused and concentrated and that along with the steady pace keeps it united if loose. There’s still scope to reduce some of the length of the song especially in the last five minutes without affecting its integrity.

While the album is long and has passages of heavy grinding music, it’s not exhausting and it’s less of an endurance test than would be expected for epic doom / sludge / post-rock fusion music. Izah do have some pop sensibility and know what will appeal and how much to dole out. The album easily lends itself to separate hearings – you could treat tracks 1 to 3 as a unit separate from the title track if you wish or if you feel brave, hear everything in one go. “Sistere” (the album) is actually consistent musically all the way through even though the temptation to range far and wide and eccentrically with the style and songs Izah have must have been strong. The result is an album that is well balanced between single-minded direction and experimentation that goes far enough without falling over completely into messy self-indulgence.

Since I heard and reviewed Liturgy’s “Renihilation” years ago, I must admit I didn’t follow the band’s career all that closely and I managed to miss “Aesthetica” plus a couple of other releases of their entirely. The band also shifted from 20 Buck Spin (which released “Renihilation”) to Thrill Jockey Records, a label I’ve never favoured much as I’ve sometimes found its “post rock” and “experimental” releases to be fairly ordinary and sounding more mainstream / commercial than their genres would suggest. However labels can and do change, and Liturgy’s direction after “Renihilation” probably meant the band was less compatible with 20 Buck Spin’s doom metal / psychedelic metal specialty, and Thrill Jockey Records took the guys on, so it was with some curiosity that I decided to check out the band’s 2015 album “The Ark Work”.

The band has moved far from its eccentric black metal roots into equally manic techno / post rock territory and the first few spins present a bewildering and manic sonic universe of shrill pointillist histrionics under unbearably high pressure, epic and bombastic in scope, all presided over by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s singing, which to be frank doesn’t measure up to the insane and punishing heights of the music. The boyish vocals are more chanted than sung and stay within a very limited pitch range, which is clearly intended to be hypnotic and trance-inducing; the effect though is deadened, a bit machine-like and very monotonous, especially on “Vitriol”, much of which consists of a cappella singing. On other tracks like “Father Vorizen”, HH-H sounds like an asylum inmate hunched up in a corner mumbling gibberish, completely ignored by the music which crashes away pursuing its own goals. Whatever lyrics we are supposed to be hearing – and they dwell on death, rebirth and transcendental themes – fall by the wayside.

Black metal elements there are mainly in the stuttery machine drumming and tremolo guitar but they form the background against which triumphalist Roman-gladiator brass trumpet screech and other synth-generated orchestral instrumentation might posture. On “Follow II”, the black metal transforms into a manic angel being zooming high into the heavenly firmament and far beyond in a manic machine cartoon way. After a couple of songs, you start to grasp the general musical leitmotif and realise you’re never going to escape those annoying monotone vocals, no matter how much the music throws its weight around, how frantically Fox beats those tom-toms, how hysterically deranged those guitar chords become or how shrieky the bagpipes blow.

For all the crash-and-burn bombast, the music is more alienating than inclusive and immersive: those vocals don’t help and the electronic production flattens the sound as well. The most memorable track on the album for me turned out to be the short “Haelegen”, an all-instrumental wavering organ piece all in its own quietly lonesome corner. That’s probably a backhanded way of summing up the album.

With their fifth album “The Long Goodbye”, these Dutch musicians who are known only by their three-letter codenames move ever closer to the shoegazing – even if it’s dark shoegazing – zone of depressive BM. This work is solid melodic ambient black metal / post-metal, at once harsh, often aggressive on the one hand and on the other filled with hope and sunshine in parts, eager and focused on the future.

From the start the band’s style is very smart, business-like and brimming with confidence. The songs sometimes have a hurried feel to them and even those passages that are meant to be ambient / acoustic, with all the churning guitar shower out of the way, are rushed. The music can be very pretty, as on a track like “Converging towards the Light”, and the synthesisers add warmth and bright sheen, but there are times where everything is bit too glossy and the mood and atmosphere are forced. In the later half of the album, a more definite moody urban blues quality arises in songs like “Endless Skies” where black metal elements recede into the background to allow cleaner guitar chords, mellow synth lines and some piano to dominate.

The musicians put a lot of energy into this recording and the quality of sound is rich enough (though not too much so) while keeping that necessary sharp and hard edge. The guitars and keyboards balance each other perfectly, the percussion sticks closely to its time-keeping function and the raspy vocals add raw anguish: these all make for a complex style of fusion BM, post-metal and urban blues.

Yet I can’t shake off the feeling that the trio have dug themselves a hole from which they may never escape if the album meets with more acclaim than criticism, which it’s likely to do. Everything sounds just too perfect and too rushed, and the whole album is like a rollercoaster checklist of necessary highs and lows to be churned through and ticked off. Songs don’t have enough repetition of distinctive melodies and riffs (which need to be less smooth and more jagged) to stand out from one another. If you are familiar with shoegazer BM, post-metal and the depressive and bleak BM-lite rock / urban blues pop of bands like Lifelover and Circle of Ouroboros, you may find this album to be a bit ordinary, not very original and even commercial and generic in parts.

My interest was piqued when I heard that Janvs had re-recorded an early demo “Nigredo”, and not just re-recorded it but left out half the original songs, rearranged the order of the remaining songs and then included a cover of an Enslaved song that the band had done for a compilation tribute. On top of that, a few years have passed since I last heard anything by this Italian band. Of the original songs on the demo, “Abisso”, “Rovina”, “Imperium” and “Suicidio” survive and they are reworked as melodic post-metal / progressive rock epic pieces.

The opener “Abisso” announces the band’s musical revision of “Nigredo” with pounding bass drum and a layered trilling jewel-guitar sound that owes equal debts to black metal and post-metal. The overall tone is very melancholy and the thumping bass drum might signify something ominously portentous. Bass guitar is surprisingly clear beneath the dense guitar-work (there are two layers of continuous guitar) and the drumming, but this can be explained by the generally clear production and clean sound. The only qualm a listener might have is that the vocal is very hard to hear and comes across as very strained, as if it was being crushed between two slabs of granite and the unlucky sandwich fill is crumbling away. While the main melody is quite pleasant, it’s not very remarkable and the song is repetitive. “Imperium” is a slow, sorrowful song, lumbering for the most part, and the main things that redeem it are the bass guitar melody that sometimes wants to run away and the occasional guitar sparkle. As with “Abisso”, repetition dominates: the idea behind this is to create a hypnotic and trance-like state in which listeners become lost and at one with the music and its message of longing. The problem though is that the songs here (with the exception of the Enslaved cover) are not long enough to allow full immersion and not all of them progress towards a resolution but tend to stay much the same throughout.

“Suicidio” is an emotionally moving piece with bass guitar runs up and down the scale and a rich, almost jangly guitar sound. Brass accompaniment add emotional depth to the music and for several minutes I almost believe that the song might be working towards a climax and something that relieves the tension and sense of unease and dread. The energy of the song instead passes onto “Rovina”, a more hopeful and optimistic piece.

The best track turns out to be the Enslaved cover “793” which unfortunately shows up Janvs’ shortcomings in the song-writing and music composition department. This is the longest song, the most energetic and intense as well, and also the most self-contained and easily identifiable, with a definite focus and direction.

All the technical mastery and arrangements, lavish as they are, can’t mask the fact that Janvs’ original songs are not that great and that the band needs to take a leaf out of Enslaved’s book on how to write really great songs which need no complex post-metal / art rock padding to improve them.

The Clearing Path is a solo black metal project headed by Gabriele Gramaglia who lives in Milan in northern Italy and draws inspiration from the wild landscapes of the nearby Italian Alps. The project combines black metal, hardcore and post-metal and these influences can be heard on the project’s debut album “The Watershed between Earth and Firmament”, a homage to the mountains and the waterfalls in the area that has inspired Gramaglia and where he finds spiritual solace.

The album should be heard in its entirety for the full appreciation of its tremendous power and energy though it’s made up of six tracks with titles alluding to the mysterious, almost transcendental spiritual power of nature and of water in its various manifestations (as waterfall, river or still lake) in particular. For what is basically a bedroom project, Gramaglia handles all the instruments well (the drumming, a mix of synth and natural, is especially powerful) and his production skills are good too. The guitars have a dark sparkly, jangly quality a little reminiscent of Deathspell Omega and I think this album would appeal to DSO fans not only for its sound but also for its high technical level and polish and the jazzy quality of much of the music.

Early tracks like “Holy Waters” and “Sacred Mountain” are brutal aggressive pieces with strong driving bass and heavy blast-beats that tear holes through your consciousness, through which a strong radiant light that hints of expansive spiritual revelation can shine. The music is powerful and focused as well as precise; the only problem I see is that the thin spidery BM vocal is limited in range and can’t match the music in power and expressiveness. Halfway through the album, “Atop the Throat, My Glance Cautiously Surveys the Depths” is a thrilling if short instrumental piece, all booming drums and sheets of raw brittle tremolo guitar, capturing the exhilaration, awe and fear you might feel on climbing a hill and coming across a roaring river or waterfall in its full churning and splashing power and glory.

Returning to earth, the album continues to “This River will carry Me towards the Grandest Light”, the longest track and one expressing hope and optimism after a journey through darkness and many obstacles. Combining influences from hardcore and melodic post-metal, this piece stands apart from the rest in its scope. It ranges far and wide in mood and structure, mixes up its pacing with many stops and starts, and brings in new riffs and melodies throughout, yet it remains steadfast in its quest towards its goal. The track slackens off into an inexplicable pop interlude a few minutes before the end but then regains some of its former glory.

Having heard this album a few times, I’m very impressed with its power, majesty and single-minded focus, and apart from a few little niggles like that hiccup in the last track where Gramaglia went a bit sugary-sweet with the happy bass melody, this is a very enjoyable debut. Overall the album might be a bit top-heavy with most of the really brutal music in its first half and the happier, lighter music in its second half but the energy doesn’t dissipate, and the change in style and mood is consistent with the album’s theme. I’m prepared to stick my neck out to say this album will be one of the most outstanding debut recordings for 2015.

Russian one-man black metal projects are a dime a dozen these days; perhaps this phenomenon is a sign of the increasing prosperity of the country, that many people in different parts of Russia now are forming their own bands or projects, writing and playing their own music, and releasing it independently or through various labels. Sivyj Yar is one solo project (based in Vyritsa in the Leningrad administrative district near Saint Petersburg) that has actually been going for nearly decade with a respectable discography, with “From the Dead Villages’ Darkness” being its third full-length release.

Sivyj Yar’s main lyrical concerns deal with Russian / Slavic mythology, past cultural and pagan heritage and pride. On this album though, to judge from the songs’ titles translated into English, the theme is the suffering of rural villages and peasants, as an important strand in the make-up of the Russian character, its stoicism and patience in the face of hardship and disaster. The arrangement of the songs suggests a definite narrative from the initial disaster (perhaps a mass burning?) to its aftermath: all appears to be hopeless and the whole world seems to be shutting down. Listeners might presume that Nature will reclaim the abandoned fields and the fallen wooden houses of peasants either killed or long gone away.

The music takes in many influences from folk to post-metal and features various acoustic instruments such as violin, cello and flute but essentially it is melodic and often pop-friendly post-BM with an emphasis on catchy tremolo-guitar riffs, capable lead guitar soloing and often very good drumming. Bass guitar sometimes follows its own path through the music and in a number of tracks nature-based field recordings like falling water may be used. Songs coast along at a brisk pace and main man Vladimir finds room for blast-beat drumming sequences. Each track is crafted with thought and care, with the result that while there might be a lot of music in each song, it never sounds rushed or confused and each instrument can be heard clearly, though the quality of production might not be great (it sounds a little bleached). Background cold space-ambient synth wash on some tracks gives the music a chilling, despairing effect and there is a strong sense of hopelessness.

There can be a lot to absorb here and I would have preferred the album to be a bit slower to allow the melancholy, the loneliness and the dark atmosphere to make more impression than they do. The singing can be thin and ragged and it has to fight for attention above the guitars and the swirling violin melodies. The odd occasion where one instrument might be allowed to play, to express the despair and hopelessness in the lyrics, would have been very welcome. There are moments where a bluesy-sounding guitar appears and they carry intense emotion. Sivyj Yar could have brought in a balalaika or zither for an even more folk-flavoured rural BM style that would make the music stand out more among his post-BM contemporaries.

In my view, this is a very good album but it could have been much better with a less generic and commercial-sounding post-BM influence and more Slavic folk and ambient elements.

Contact: Avantgarde Music

Dedicating their career to detailing the stories and various aspects of American early 20th-century writer H P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, French post-BM band The Great Old Ones – even their name demonstrates their total commitment to all that is Lovecraftian – deliver their second album which in a nutshell is a musical retelling of the classic short story / novella “At the Mountains of Madness”. If you want a short summary of that story, a team of explorers follows in the footsteps of an earlier group of adventurers in Antarctica and stumble upon the ruins of an ancient city; there the team discovers not only what became of that lost group but also the secrets of an ancient civilisation that pre-dates even the rise of the dinosaurs; and moreover, indications that the creators and destroyers of this civilisation may be slumbering beneath Antarctica until the time comes for their revival. That revival is not far off and when it does happen, it will signal the end of humanity. We have a lot to look forward to!

As befits a soundtrack inspired by a story that delineates the magnitude of the malevolence that the explorers unwittingly stumble over, the album revels in a massive and majestic sound. The danger with this undertaking is that the music might become too unrestrained and overwhelming, the players derailed by the scale of their ambition into wanking off on dreary solo guitar and sheer indulgent bombast might be the result. There is plenty of chug-a-lug weightiness in the music and maybe a bit of editing for length is needed here and there but on the whole the musicians try to keep everything moving at a steady clip. TGOO really start to hit their stride with “The Elder Things” with some very rich and luxurious layers of guitar, organ and synthesiser, frantic drumming and passages of often catchy riffing and melodies. The formidable nature of one of the ultimate enemies of humankind is grasped with music that ranges from sweeping, slashing guitar grandeur to moments of blast-beat desperation.

The one weakness I find with this album is the singing which does not vary much when individual songs, written and sung from different points of view, would suggest that different vocal styles should be used. This is apparent on “Awakening” where the lyrics switch the point of view away from the humans, and a really guttural death-metal vocal might have been called for.

“The Ascend” (sic) gives an opportunity for the band to let off a lot of tension and steam in a runaway instrumental of blast-beat rush and tom-tom pounding but it does not add a great deal to the album’s overall development. That burden falls onto the last track “Behind the Mountains” which sums up what the explorers find and their final warning to their fellow humans. This is a sprawling, meandering work ranging from fast and raging to slow, quiet and introspective, all held together by the lyrics.

There’s plenty of ambition and grandeur on the album, and the music is technically good and consistent, yet somehow it just didn’t go far enough for me. There is chilly atmosphere but there’s not enough frigid space showing how utterly alien, unearthly and above all hostile and malignant the lost civilisation and its creators are. With this subject matter, I’d have liked to hear something really cold and reptilian, something that crawls down your spine, freezes your blood and utterly petrifies you so you can’t move, and you feel fear and fright because of that. There’s too much post-BM busyness and rush going on hither and thither and not enough of the sense of dread, cold bleakness and ultimate despair at the thought of humanity meeting an adversary here on Earth utterly committed to its destruction, and the universe continuing on, caring nothing for our extinction.

This might be an instance where a post-BM style of music wasn’t really appropriate to tackle the theme of an incredibly old and extraterrestrial civilisation menacing all life on Earth, and humans feeling completely helpless and desperate when Cthulhu and company finally arrive for all-out Total War with the Elder Ones.

Contact: Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions

First off, I should say there are two English bands with almost the same name: there is a northern English (Manchester-based) black metal act called Mire and then there is a southern (Brighton-based) doomster band The Mire. Good thing the southerners got the definite article in there as these fellows have been slow in releasing studio work – they have had label problems apparently and of this time of writing were unsigned – but they did manage to get their debut album with the eye-catching cover artwork (ha ha) out in early 2014.

This debut full-length demonstrates The Mire’s ability to write and play massive heavy-duty pounding riffs backed by very deep steel bass melodies (which come to the fore on most tracks) and some excellent percussion that generally supports the guitars and bass. The album begins properly with Track 2 “False Idol” which showcases the band’s style in a nutshell: a mix of sludge-doom metal, alternative rock, post-metal melancholy and something of a hardcore sensibility in the singing which alternates between clean-toned choirboy-like on the one hand, and something grittier and tensed up on the other. Most of the time the guitars hit hard and powerfully with concrete-block riffs. Lead guitar solos can be surprisingly light and fleet-footed and there are plenty of moments where the bass shapes the music and takes a lead melodic role. There is some tremolo guitar in a few songs.

As the album progresses, listeners will note that most songs are self-contained, each one potential singles material if the band were so inclined to milk the songs for all they’re worth. Sorrowing emotion, loss of hope and a strong sense of vulnerability can be very strong in amongst the hard-hitting slabs of music. An ambience approaching near-psychedelic with sparkling lead guitar soloing takes an unexpected turn into bleak darkness on “Triple Gemini” and the song turns out to be quite complex in its emotion if occasionally losing its focus. “Embers” features some unusual but very effective key changes in its bass riffing. “Pale Heart” reveals unexpected tenderness in the music that sits well with the hard outer shell of rumbling steel bass and shriek ragged vocal.

This is one of those albums where most tracks are so good that listeners will disagree as to which songs are better than others. The standard is such that even very average songs here have some outstanding qualities whether in technical execution, the realisation of mood or atmosphere, or song-writing flair. Perhaps the weakest part of the album – not that we can tell from the music – might be in the narrow range of lyrical subject matter: the lyrics are very intensely personal and speak of personal disillusionment and disappointment, and the fragility of hope. No doubt the musicians poured their frustrations with their label into the music which must have been a form of therapy for them.

After hearing this album, I have to sympathise with The Mire that in spite of the excellence of this work, they still don’t have a deal and this recording is begging for a distributor. Some folks might suggest the band members are being “difficult” but we should reserve judgement on the musicians’ behaviour at this stage if what they want their music to be respected on its own terms. If enough readers here were to take the time and look up this album to hear it for themselves, and decide whether “Glass Cathedrals” deserves a wider hearing enough, that they lobby various labels to pick it up, then this review will have done its job.

Contact: The Mire (Bandcamp page)

Translating into English as “the sea that now has become known”, Mare Cognitum is a one-man atmospheric post-black metal project based in Santa Ana, in California. Its musical influences seem to come from Cascadian black metal and the post-BM of other American acts like Panopticon but MC main man Jacob Buczarski’s thematic inspiration might well be bands like Darkspace who contemplate the far reaches of outer space and beyond. The rushing streams of Cascadian-style BM, by turns aggressive and melancholy yet hopeful, paired with concepts of deep space, the darkness within and the opportunity this affords for existential contemplation should be an ideal combination to tackle over several albums. “Phobos Monolith” as it turns out happens to be MC’s third full-length excursion into this realm.

MC’s style is a massive roaring behemoth and at times during this recording I marvelled that Buczarski was able to keep on top of it all, let alone control his creation enough to direct it to his ends. There seem to be endless layers of tremolo guitars all going off at once and their combined sound reaches high to the firmaments of heaven and as far as horizons reach in all directions. Drumming likewise is insanely manic for much of the album, in its first half especially. Yes, they are programmed drums but at least Buczarski has shaped the beats and rhythms, almost in the manner of a sculptor, to fit the changing moods of his guitar storms. In parts of the album, the machine beats of the percussion are even sped up to hyper-crazy levels to the point where they take form in feather-light double-helix spirals: now that’s what I call inventive! In this maelstrom, the paper-thin rasping vocals are simply another element that helps to modify the atmosphere and direction of the songs.

Well there are four songs but I would be hard pressed to identify them track by track as there’s not a great deal to distinguish one from the next. Suffice to say the album divides into two halves with a faster first half and a more contemplative and sorrowing second half. I much prefer the earlier half of the album as the faster pace keeps Buczarski busy with a musical balancing act in keeping his instruments modulated so some don’t overpower the others. Here the energy is fierce and the rhythms are vigorous and powerful. There’s still plenty of space for atmospheric cosmic effects and Buczarski’s own slavering vocals. An overwhelming sense of not just total immersion but also being pulled along by unseen monstrous forces is present.

The album’s second half tends towards bombast (especially in the track “Noumenon” which is the slowest of the four on offer) and self-indulgence (on the paradoxically named “Ephemeral Eternities”) that imagines itself soundtrack material for a Hollywood blockbuster sci-fi movie series. At this point it is not so much the music running away from Buczarski as its potential for baroque richness (and the perils that lie within that) getting the better of its creator so that he allows his creation to control him.

Yes this album is a mighty monster but like all children it needs some discipline to become truly effective when mature … some editing for length is needed in the songs, and a few quiet interludes within and between tracks to allow listeners time to reflect on what they’ve heard, catch their breath and wonder at the scale of what they’ve just experienced might have been welcome as well.

Contact: I, Voidhanger Records