Battle's Clarion

For their second album, Averse Sefira took the fast melodic riffing (not gothenburg style melodic, but rather heavy riffs that have some melody), and made it far more chaotic (which is extremely fitting and obviously intentional since the album is, as the name would indicate, about battle). This album’s riffs use dissonance much more frequently, which helps to create that chaos. The high speed riffs definitely show a bit of a death metal influence, especially from bands like Massacra or early Morbid Angel.

Song structures here also aid in this chaos. Songs are literally about half the length (average song length is 3:53, however when the two stand alone interludes “Withering, the Storm…” and “The Thousand Aeon Stare” aren’t counted, the average song length is 4:29, which is slightly less than half of the average song length on Homecoming’s March, which is just over nine minutes), but contain about twice the riffs. Riffs are repeated much less, and change more frequently (this also stops the riff over-repetition of the previous album), but they flow well with each other. As with the previous album- don’t expect verse/chorus/bridge songwriting here.

With this emphasis on chaos, it would be easy to expect 35 minutes of pointless blasting. That’s not what you’ll get, though. It may be chaotic, but it’s still melodic, and not just “three chords played really fast”.

The drumming this time is done by a human (Carcass, from Death of Millions, who was also at one point a touring drummer for Immolation), and he does an excellent job. He can blast along when the album calls for it, but he has a sense of dynamics- usually relying on a mid-paced snare-high hat punctuated with quite competent fills, and an occasional run of double-bass.

Vocals here are fairly similar to the last album- a typical black metal shriek, similar to the vocals on Gorgoroth’s “Antichrist”, although without that “castrated duck” tone. When more experimental vocals are used, unlike on the last album, they succeed very well- on Deathymn, Lord Imperial (from Krieg) and MkM (from Antaeus) provide this sort of ghostly moaning background voice, which goes very well with the song. Also, there’s a few spots of well done dual-vocal interplay, and a cool echo effect is used in the first half of “The Nascent Ones (The Age of Geburah)”.

Production here is a much more “black metal” production than the one on the last album- a sort of “metallic”, thin guitar sound, similar to the one on Satyricon’s “Nemesis Divina”, drums fairly moderate in the mix, although it is a bit unusual (in a good way) in that the bass is somewhat separate from the guitars and more audible than on most BM albums.

Lyrically, it’s about one group of angels battling another for some sort of “hollow gain” (the lyrics are never more specific than that), and being destroyed.

As with the last album, Battle’s Clarion features several absolutely chilling, otherworldly ambient interludes, which the band refers to as “aversions” as either intros or outros for the songs. They are, however, used somewhat more tastefully here, and fit the songs a bit better. Also, there are two that are stand alone songs- “Withering, the Storm…” and “The Thousand Aeon Stare”, and have to be some of the creepiest sounds ever put on a disc. They definitely have a structure to their noise, however, which is an interesting effect.

As the title says, this is in my opinion easily the best black metal album of the last five years. If you don’t already have this, get it now.