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The noble cry of the ancestors comes from the new album by Temnozor! Of course, you won’t see the word “Temnozor” in the booklet, but you can hear it without difficulty. It's simple: Gromoverzh is a new solo project by Stringsskald, the main composer of that group (as Svyagir), and his debut album is based on material that Anton created when he was in that cult band, but for one reason or another was not released. The first recordings were made in the mid-2010s, and by the early 2020s the album was arranged, recorded and mixed.

It would be worth emphasizing that this long-term aging, which without a doubt only benefited the album, becomes obvious at its very first listening and, moreover, from the first sounds of the introduction “Очервлённые Брега / Barkened Shores”. An acoustic guitar, intertwined with enveloping synthesizer Gregorian singing and the playing of a guest flutist from the old TZ line-up, calmly but persistently draws you into the Slavic expanses revealed by Stringsskald.

The main part of the long-play opens with a track typical of early Gorruth's Temnozor, based on a fast tempo, Anton's screaming and again an active flute theme - simple and ecstatically looped, but also beautiful. Such a composition (its name is “Повергая Неисконное” / “Overthrowing the Unoriginal”) could well decorate, for example, Temnozor's ‘Horizons...’ (Горизонты...’) album. The melancholy and sorrow contained in its riffs deepens and spills out in the beautiful, thoughtful mid-tempo “В Ладонях Зари / In the Palms of the Dawn” with the velvety baritone of the next guest, Anton Kochemirovsky. Subsequently, the composition develops at the speed of the previous track, placing heart-warming melodies on the mystical atmosphere soaring in the air. There is something of Archaic Silence project in this. “Земля Молчаливых Камней / Land of Silent Stones” serves as its exact continuation, first picking up the pace with the baritone in a doomy manner, and then slowly developing the “voiceless” part with the instrumentation already familiar to the listener (it is constant throughout the release). This song is the reflective pole of the album. In a completely different way, the short track “Во Славу Одина! / For the Glory of Odin!” bursts into the picture with jubilant contrast: dancing, thunder, a warlike cry, the voices of Scandinavian gods in Russian pipes.

What comes next is hard not to call the load-bearing wall of the release: the epic, almost half-hour (!) “Меч Вольгаста / The Sword of Wolgast” is divided into 6 conceptual parts, different in tempo, density and mood; here there is folk, and pagan black metal, and sublime flute transitions in the middle - a little drawn out, albeit staged at a conscious acceleration, bursting into the second half of the composition. More interesting than the whole song is its wonderful acoustic finale with the clear voice of Vitaly Evseev, vocalist of the South Siberian band URGAband. Echoes of Stringsskald’s stoner-doom band – Old Sea And Mother Serpent – can be seen in the solemn 11-minute “Драконы Моря / Dragons of the Sea”, built on fuzz and carrying something different, gloomily traditionalist, which is visibly promoted by both clean voices used earlier. Only towards the very end does the flute melody, which came untouched from the intro, loop this trip and ouroborosically lead the listener to the point from which it all began. By the way, this is the only composition with lyrics from Stringskald himself - in all the others, the lyrics are taken from the well-known Russian heathen poet Veleslav. A brief conclusion to “Туманы над Рожью / Mists Above the Rye” brings the solid 73 minutes of the album to a close.

To summarize, I would like to note that the sound content of the record stands head and shoulders above its design, which looks rather naive both in the style of drawing and in the plot - this artwork, of course, cannot compete with the covers of Temnozor. The name of the project also seems rather strange. On the other hand, we are pleased with the detailed logo, which is a relative rarity on Russian scene. The musical part is very worthy both for its melodic-arrangement accessibility and the compositional level as a whole - it contains neither the unnecessary pathos of the Temnozor from Moscow, nor the youthful imperfection of the Temnozor from Obninsk (let me remind you that, according to Gorruth, the capital group is a direct continuation of the Obninsk group). Considering the impressive timing of the album preparing, it will be interesting to look at Gromoverzh's future works, since he is clearly not the last rank as a musician and songwriter.