Ayloss, the man behind Spectral Lore, resides in Athens, but his latest effort sounds far removed from the traditional traits of Greek black metal, drawing instead upon a dense and dynamic Eastern-European aesthetic merged with a heavy dose of Nordic coldness. It leans towards the shamanic and euphoric, the lengthy and complex songs twisting and writhing like ancient sigils, and continues to work on the mind long after the last track has ended.
There’s a lot going on here. Whilst broken down into six tracks, it’s an album that really needs to be consumed as a whole, as the songs are constantly changing shape, suddenly disintegrating into quiet contemplation before re-emerging completely changed, with walls of harsh, cyclonic riffing rubbing shoulders with passages of atonal weirdness, droning ambience and rich, brooding synth. ‘All Devouring Earth’, recalls the howling, cacophonous sound of early Blut Aus Nord, chaotic barrages full of dissonance and fury battering away at the senses, contrasted by trancelike nods towards ‘Filosofem’, with eerie tremolo riffs emerging slowly from the mist. The whole album is packed to bursting with a dense undergrowth of reedy, melodic riffs that feel energised and alive; a vital and organic sound that harks back to that earthy, ethereal feel of original-lineup Negura Bunget.
‘The Dejection of Arjuna’ is bombastic and raw, its searing riffs tinged with an eastern folkiness, lurching occasionally into rumbling, Hate Forest-style cavalry-charges, whilst ‘The Coming of Age’,-easily the album’s standout track- reminds of Wodensthrone with its captivating mix of slow-building post-rock plateaus and epic swells of rousing melody. ‘Quest for the Supramental’ is different again, still most certainly BM, but infused with ritualistic ambience, Middle-Eastern scales and pounding heavy metal grooves, as if the pagan homelands have given way to massive ziggurats, or the gates of ancient Samarkand.
‘Sentinel’ is definitely a ‘headspace’ album, fluid-yet-tangential in nature and crammed full of textures that seem almost tangible, forever kick starting brave new mental sojourns into the unknown. The closing track is a 30-minute ambient piece; a blank canvas of cold stars and elusive synths that doesn’t do a great deal on it’s own but acts as processing time for what has come before. It’s mainly empty, but nicely done, and certainly doesn’t feel like padding. All in all, ‘Sentinel’ is a highly impressive album; rich and varied with a wealth of dark and overgrown spaces to get lost in. The cd’s limited to 500 copies though, so don’t hang about!
(8.5/10 Erich Zann)
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