Heart of Silence

Fundamentally, this is a ritual ambient experience crafted through the lens of black metal. But branching off this motorway is a whole plethora of adjacent flavours deployed to expand the range of colourful emotions and moods displayed across this album. Neofolk, post punk, martial industrial, all get a hearing, and all blend seamlessly into the stylistic palette, elevating the expressive contours into a fully realised vision.

These looser, informal influences make for a less structured listen than a straightforward metal album. But structure, whilst pronounced, is not the key goal here. This is finely crafted mood music, deployed to set the listener in a certain headspace. Simple, pounding rhythms, repetitive chants, percussive armoury beyond the standard rock drumkit, riffs that pivot around gradualist cycles over overt developments, all are creative decisions that speak of a desire to the throw the listener into “experience” in the abstract as opposed to taking them on a clearly mapped journey.

‘Heart of Silence’ boasts a rich and cinematic production. The metallic elements all present as crisp and polished, with a panorama of guitars filling out the mix with rich textures. They will often take a back seat, allowing clean vocals and other non-metal instrumentation to occupy a lead capacity, satisfied with their role in swelling the mix with power and imposition. Drums are a deep, low-end thud of rhythmic force, offering direct, linear, driving beats that carry the music forward with an unstoppable momentum. They find the right balance between bolstering the music with a sense of power without detracting from the mystical aspirations of the wider scenery.

Vocals lurch from mid-range black metal rasping to gravelly, clean vocals lifted from neofolk and goth, expanding the melodic range, offering a narrative progression where the music tends to cycle around the same clutch of refrains. Synths, ancillary percussion, and a whole host of keyboard instrumentation from strings to harpsichords populate the mix with immersive spiritualism.

A profound and dramatic sense of ritual that eschews the notion of metallic formalism, in favour of a succession of complimentary but disconnected experiences of varying intensity and mood colourings. Complexity abounds despite the informalities, the musicianship is tight, the arrangement considered, the execution faultless. A tasteful sense of theatre brings all these elements to bear into a multifaceted and endlessly engaging experience.

Originally published at Hate Meditations