The Feast of Clipped Wings

For a debut album, "The Feast of Clipped Wings" runs at a mere 15 minutes and a bit so I initially imagined most tracks would be short blats of sonic fury or mini-soundscapes of ambience and noise. As it turns out, there are just three songs that could be called substantial in any way and the shorter tracks are tiny snapshots of ambience.

"Under Consult of the Dragon" seems a triumphant martial piece if you pay attention only to the guitar / percussion barrage. The song proceeds at a brisk, smart pace and is full of purpose. The vocals are screechy though and give the impression of mass frenzy giving way to pain later. Likewise "Temple Prostitute" is a pumped-up track with roaring shouty voices that appear deranged and desperate after a while, hard driving rhythm and a pounding beat.

"Impurity Flowing Upwards" is the best of the three long songs with a distinctive and powerful riff that's equally melancholic and hopeful. The song improves with more music elements, howling and screaming in the background, changes in key and a tension between the apparently jovial rhythms and mood of the song on the one hand and on the other the screeching far back in the mix. It's possible the screaming could be celebratory and perhaps the vocals have been deliberately recorded in such a way that ambiguity as to their purpose and meaning is intended. The coda suggests that maybe I'm right in thinking the vocal is more anguished than happy or triumphant.

Of the remaining tracks, the best is "The Scroll unfurled further still ...", a deep menacing track of one prolonged drone that tunnels into the deepest recesses of your mind and loses itself there before you realise what its purpose is. There's just the tiniest bit of noise scree added to the track.

In this tiny cassette, A Pregnant Light have squeezed in quite a complex set of music that at first seems incredibly angry, filled with intense rage and violence, and which reveals an inner sadness and despair as songs progress. For such short songs with lo-fi production, they can sound extremely huge and have an absolutely raw sound. The ambient music is quietly sinister and shows that the band has potential to move very far from its raw black metal / punk foundations. "The Feast ..." definitely should have been a longer set and perhaps some time in the future the band can revisit the music and extend it so that its full power and complexity are revealed.