Black Metal History Month -Felsenmirror : "s/t"

 When black metal comes from Portland, my first guess is it is a bunch of crust hippies. I am not wrong here. They do have a dark sound and are very deliberate, which I prefer to a bunch of blast beats, and I am not even ten days into Black Metal History Month and running out of new stuff, so I am going to give this one a shot. I think its a woman handling the screaming, it has wretched anguish but none of the resonance of a man's scream. If you are hippie from Portland, you might think this is a sexist statement, but it is a matter of science and the density of vocal cords and how women are made different from a man's no matter how much she drinks and smokes. Anatomy is a branch of science. You remember science what you were screaming for everyone to trust two years ago with your mask on hiding under your bed. Not a fan of long songs but they keep my attention with the ten-minute opening track. 

I like their use of ambience and how they weave samples into it. The second song leans more into the open space of post-rock, allowing the song to creep together from clouds that are parting, to lead you into the listless drift. The roar back to life, which is a dynamic contrast I also appreciate. This album is said to be ab homage to the stages of grief, and I suppose I can hear it. It wanders off in the last minutes of the song, before building once more. "Fear in a Handful of Ash" is faced with the challenge of bringing something new to the table. They croak over a more sludge ridden stomp, which is a smart move as it avoids retracing their steps back into the post-rock colored black metal. The bleakness of crust can be heard here. 

The last song "the Truth Reveals Itself in the Dark" sticks closer to the parameters of black gaze, with more emphasis put on the shoe gazing as the song progresses. There is a doomy mood pounding things into place once the blast beats fade away. They continue prove themselves skilled at creating this mood, it might not be the most original band ever, but they take building blocks set forth before them and arrange them into something that is their own, I will give this one a 9.5, and see how it grows on me. If you were to take away the folk of Agalloch, long with the more technical side of their guitar work and replaced it with crust then you would get something close to what goes down here.