Dirges

This album was recommended to me a while ago, and I was initially pretty eager to listen to it. I like a lot of atmoblack and I’m always down to listen to more of it. The album artwork was intriguing, and the song titles gave me the impression I was about to go on some sort of potentially depressing journey, so I was looking forwards to this.

The intro track was interesting enough; it was intended to set up the general mood and atmosphere of the album, and I think the chilling harmonized vocals and the sound of crashing waves did a good job of that. I liked the clean intro to the first proper track. When the black metal bit kicked in, it was pretty much exactly what one would expect from atmospheric black metal: fast paced blast beats, distant cymbals, indistinguishable agonized shrieking, iffy production, and slightly clean guitar. I typically prefer my vocals to be a bit louder and higher in the mix, but I still think the ones on this album were really good. And either they got better as the album progressed, or they just grew on me a lot, because after the first track I started enjoying them a lot more thoroughly. For the most part they kind of blended in with the rest of the instrumentals, creating a not quite earsplitting, but still intense, wall of sound. Overall, although there were numerous melodic parts in the album, it was definitely more focused on that sound the any clear, consistent, and separated melodies. The general sound did have to grow on me a bit beforehand, but similarly to the vocals, after a while I found myself thoroughly enjoying this.

The guitar wasn’t really riff driven or super clear and obvious compared to the rest of the instruments, but that’s basically par for the course with a lot of the more underground atmoblack, so I don’t have any complaints whatsoever about that. I actually really enjoyed the percussive sound they achieved with the distorted guitar and the blast beats. I also liked the sparse but still noticeable melodic element that the album had, from the synthy sound layered above the heaviness, to the slowed down, clean melodic interludes. During these interludes, the guitar had some really nice acoustic and clean tones. Melodies weren’t a consistent factor in this album, as they were pretty sparsely distributed throughout. However, the ones that were there were very enjoyable. The drums kinda played the same blast beats throughout the entire album, so it wasn’t exactly that exciting, however this was clearly meant to be focused on sound and atmosphere rather than unique melodies, so I can’t really complain. The production wasn’t fantastic, but it definitely grew on me as well.

The songwriting was good in the sense that as soon as I was getting bored with whatever was going on, they changed it up a bit with a soft interlude or a different rhythm. Pretty much the entire album took the first track or so to grow on me, but at around the second actual track, I started enjoying this a lot. The first little while of the first song was a bit difficult to listen to and I was worried I wasn’t going to like this album that much, but I did end up liking this a lot.

Overall, this was a very solid atmoblack album that I can definitely see myself revisiting in the future.