Yūgen

If you ever get the chance to see these guys live, I would wholeheartedly recommended it. They have a sound that I described to a friend immediately after their set that sounds like "if Agalloch fucked Isis using keyboards as a dildo". They had that wandering sense of ebb and flow like the post-metal pioneers, but all of the melodies were carved straight out of The Mantle, and the keyboards sort of connected it all together and added a layer of dreaminess you don't really see in the same way in either of those bands. Revisiting their album on record, it definitely seems like when you put it all together, you get the same kind of nostalgic vibe that Alcest gave off in their better moments. What's even more impressive is that a majority of the band members are just turning 20 years old in 2017. They're hella young, already on their second album and can hold their own live compared to most atmospheric black metal contemporaries.

Unfortunately, the transition from a live setting to a recorded album wasn't a perfect one. When the keyboard and clean guitars are on their own, the lush dreaminess of everything is still retained, and that feeling of aimlessly gazing into a starry sky is replicated very nicely. Once the meat of the album really kicks in, however, the keyboards and the crash cymbals just seem to drown out everything else. What this ends up doing is creating an album that is very top-heavy. All the frills and garnishes are nicely in place, but the meat in the guitars is lacking and is something that is almost essential for a black metal album. Even Alcest and Wolves in the Throne Room still had a few heavy riffs here and there; you need that backbone to ground the atmosphere and give it some contrast.

Not to say that the frills and garnishes aren't well-done in their own right. There's a little vocoder section here, a little angelic and haunting female vocal section there, all of the bells and whistles that make a great album are right in place, but the core is missing. Nick Stanger's clean vocals aren't revolutionary, but they appear at the right times and do their job, and the harsh vocal tone perhaps doesn't have that raw, shrieking quality I look for in black metal but his more middling rasp suits the tone of the album very nicely. The songwriting is very, very well done; you know exactly where the builds are and when the release is going to happen, and that's perhaps what makes the production job so much more frustrating. You know exactly when the big moments are coming, and then when they hit, you try to let the huge riffs wash over you but all you hear is a sort of faded twanging in the background. It's like somebody walking in on you having sex right when you pass the point of no return: the good feeling begins to wash over you, but as the dynamite goes boom it's mixed with a sense of shame that makes the entire experience a bit disappointing.

I really, really want to recommend this, because these guys are onto something, but until they tweak the mix a little bit my full-blown praise will unfortunately be reserved for their live shows. The sound was much more balanced there and the guitars actually cut through; you'd think with both a lead and a rhythm guitarist that it wouldn't be an issue, but in a recorded setting this is a classic case of atmosphere taking precedent over the riffs. Inevitably, you can't have the former without the latter to back it up. In short: I love the ideas, but hate the production job.