Mizmor : "Yodh"

 This one man black metal project out of Oregon is dark and dense, but that is the minimum requirement for the genre. So we are going to see if this project is worth the hype beginning to simmer around it. Not always relying on blast beats the openers drops down into weighty doom laced sections. At thirteen minutes are is album going to be capable of creating songs or sprawling sections of heavily drone distorted mush? Six minutes in and I am beginning to have second thoughts as it seem this album might be trying to find life in just heaviness alone.The vocals varying from lowered death metal growls to a mid ranged rasp of torment. It's fine that this is black metal, but sonically the first song has only colored this song with similar shades. Another color is added on "Semblance Waning" with an acoustic intro. This song is eleven and a half minutes long so it can afford to kill time in the way. The guitar tone shifts as feed back hovers over it threatening to take us back to the murk.I like this song better as it meets at the hellish cross roads where you find your self asking where does doom begin and depressive black metal end? The arrangements still need some help as half way into the song it's let hand on atmosphere when it feels like this is where a more defined structure would benefit it.The answer is blast beats. This always the answer when taking the easy way out.

With the albums longest song " the Serpent Eats it's Tail" a more melodic intro is allowed for and the more doom leanings are indulged. Almost Four minutes in and we are still just getting started as the slow build lingers. I zone out on in, but nothing happened that would have jarred me from that state. By the time we get to the next song "Inertia, An Ill Compeller" I being to wonder if the beginning of the album was geared to lure you into this album thinking this a black metal album when it's a doom album, so the title blackened doom could be earned here. Two combine my two favorite sub-genres of metal you would think I would be more moved by this album since I am the target audience. Both "Inertia, An Ill Compeller" and the final song use similar clean guitar tones with it's time to stop and take a moment to think.

Ten minutes seem to be a better threshold for this project when it comes to song length as anything more it seems to be an over indulgence that doesn't benefit the song. It all ends in spastic chaos.While this album sounds good from an production stand point and it's impressive one guys pulled all of this off at the end of the day music is about songs, so I'll round this down to a 7.5. Coming from the hipster haven of Oregon, it might not be Portland, geographically it's almost like Brooklyn when sorting through the hype these days. Not the first album of the year to be hyped and not the last.