The return of perhaps our favorite depressive black metal band, with what might be their best record yet. A sprawling double disc, fourteen songs, ninety minutes, the perfect balance of lilting melodic jangle and abject pounding buzz drenched blackness. The band consummate masters of balancing the two, but goddamn if this isn't simultaneously their prettiest and poppiest, AND heaviest and most brutal record so far. Just check out the album opener, "Happy Days", the perfect band theme song if we've ever heard one, starting out all muted jangled and stripped down rhythm, a second guitar offering up a gorgeous glistening melody, you'd be forgiven for thinking this was some new lo-fi bliss pop outfit, until the sound explodes into something much more fierce, but the magic of Happy Days, is that the melody and jangle of that opening bit is carried right over into the heavy part, the drums pounding, the guitars buzzing, and that glistening second guitar melody, a gorgeously distorted melancholy sort-of-lead that winds its way through the whole track. And that's exactly what makes this stuff so good, that no matter how harsh and heavy the sound is, it's infused with a haunted melancholia, and the buzz and pound is underpinned by wistful melodies, or a minor key refrain that gives the buzz some emotional resonance, this is after all depressive, dark, hopeless music, and Happy Days perfectly capture those feelings and transform them into sound. Almost every track here is a strange fusion of grim raspy blackness, and super melodic melancholia, minus the raspy vokills, mush of this could pass for some sort of gloom pop, and even with the vocals, the production is such, that they're way less harsh than on past records, to the point that the vocals even seem to be marginally more melodic at times. To be fair, there are a few moments of fierce blackened fury, mostly sans melody, like on "No Solution", a blown out barnburner for sure, the guitars brittle and in-the-red and woozily warped, the vocals a hellish bellow, with some cool doomy chugging, but for the most part grim and harsh and harrowing, but even tracks that seem similar like "Forever Asleep (Dead)" will out of nowhere unleash some killer melody, and the whole song is transformed. So great. Fans will not be disappointed, and folks who have been a bit black metal phobic, this could very well be the sort of record that lures you over to the dark side...
Almost every track here is a strange fusion of grim raspy blackness, and super melodic melancholia, minus the raspy vokills, mush of this could pass for some sort of gloom pop, and even with the vocals, the production is such, that they're way less harsh than on past records, to the point that the vocals even seem to be marginally more melodic at times. To be fair, there are a few moments of fierce blackened fury, mostly sans melody, like on "No Solution", a blown out barnburner for sure, the guitars brittle and in-the-red and woozily warped, the vocals a hellish bellow, with some cool doomy chugging, but for the most part grim and harsh and harrowing, but even tracks that seem similar like "Forever Asleep (Dead)" will out of nowhere unleash some killer melody, and the whole song is transformed. So great. Fans will not be disappointed, and folks who have been a bit black metal phobic, this could very well be the sort of record that lures you over to the dark side...
