Ooh this sounds good, thought I as giving it a spin. It also sounded slightly familiar too and I tried to place it all in the grand scheme of things. Luckily a quick glance at the ever useful Metal Archives and our previous site reminded me that I had indeed covered this artist’s last release ‘Shadows Over The Cosmos’ in 2010. This meant that it obviously had created a long lasting impression of its own rather than any that was more plagiaristic.
The artist is actually one individual going by the name of R or Ryan if you dig slightly deeper and he handles everything here, instrumental wise as well as the incredibly deep and craggy vocals. As this is on Solitude it would be quite acceptable to listen and think this bleak windswept sound derived from the cold frozen Russian Steppes or some neglected radiation swept part of the Ukraine. In fact it does not in the slightest as the composer is from San Antonio in Texas, how much of a wilderness that is I am not sure.
What we get here are four chilling tracks that last an hour in total. I seem to be getting a lot of long tracks before me at the moment but when they are of this quality I am neither complaining nor getting bored of them in the slightest. To put things in perspective this is really best summed up as Funeral Doom with symphonic aspects that are heavily orchestrated by the ever present and mournful synthesizer tones. The melody is fantastic and incredibly atmospheric and austere and you are heavily involved in the bleak and barren soundscape for the duration of the disc. It is not one to really divide up tracks in per-se but one to sit down, shut out the outside world and consume in one sitting. The title track by title is very poetic as are the others ‘The Silence Of Centuries, etc, conjuring images that you can think of very easy if you close your eyes and spark the imagination up.
I am quite reminded of first album Ahab (in my opinion their best) by this tone wise. There is something very watery about it to my imagination, certainly cold and I guess with a title like ‘Lightless Depths’ it is going to summon that sort of deep dark atmosphere to the mind. There are times when you forget about the vocals, nothing is hurried and nothing is urgent but then they suddenly come back into the picture and enrich it with quite distinct and almost regal definition. It is like Neptune is talking to us perhaps.
This is not an album for those looking for lots of bells and whistles, it is slow and ponderous and with tracks lasting up to 18 minutes without a huge amount of variation between them it is one that you need to have patience for. I found myself loving it from the very first listen though, there was something about it that has stayed with me for repeated listens and I found The Womb Beyond The World and place of numbing beauty that I am sure will stand the test of time. It would appear that there has already been a follow up 2 track EP to this ‘Sunshine And Shadows. Hopefully it may also find its way here as this was a hugely enjoyable and mesmerising trip
(8/10 Pete Woods)
http://www.howlingvoid.com/home.cfm
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