Circle of Ouroborus has often dealt an unpredictable product when dropping albums. It could border on death rock it could be more black metal. This new album seems to bring many of the varied worlds this project has travelled in together in a pretty cohesive fashion that shows enough of every shade of sound.The exotic waver to the riff leading into "Puutarha" is a creative high point for this project. The song throbs rather than drones.This streak is broken on the more plodding drone of "Perilla" that hangs on the same note, while emotive screaming echoes into the distance.
It's only three songs of black metal before the acoustic neo-folk comes in. The first of these songs "Loputon" reminds me of a cross between Death in June and Dead Can Dance. The instrumentation is more like Brendan Perry's solo work and the vocals are more Death in June.The acoustic guitar is captured really well, which is surprising coming from a project that is normally muddy and lo-fi. However the second acoustic song, doesn't have the impact the first one had. The novelty is quickly wears off. So by the third one of these strummed folk hymns you are waiting for something to change. The singer's voice hear is a notch above Varg's folk singing. I am all for clean singing and applaud the fact it sounds like they cared about how this would sound. The last song falls out of the song preceding it so it retains a similar feels and the guitar melody carries over as well. The vocals are more broken up into a chant. But they don't bring anything new to the neo-folk table.
The neo-folk songs sound too similar , the black metal songs are some of their better stuff to date, so hopefully next time they will expand upon that and take what lessons they might have learned experiementing with folk and apply them to black metal. I will give this a 7.
No comments:
Post a Comment