Rise and Fall

Well, this is me being open-minded. No, I don't have AIDS (insider-jokes ist krieg!), it's just that Dargaard's unique brand of medieval synth-soundscape music is simply too good to leave undisturbed. With a history firmly rooted in the Austrian black metal scene - both members have done time in Abigor and Amestigon, as well as their current pagan black metal project Dominion III - Dargaard conjures up atmospheres of ancient European times through use of thoroughly modern instrumentation, which creates something of a musical paradox. Albeit an extremely well-crafted, listenable one.

Beginning with the title track, the duo's fourth album is a well-balanced palette of brooding melancholy, triumphant battle-marches and beauteous ambience. It's all rather hard to describe, to be quite honest... I could throw adjectives around all day and still not really tell you what this sounds like. There's plenty of faux-orchestral melodies, martial rhythms, epic atmospheres and lilting female vocals, often sung in Latin. The raspy male vocals which peppered the earlier works have entirely vanished here, but those were never overly important anyway. If anything, they felt like an afterthough to keep diehard black metal fanatics amused.

Anyway, back to the aforementioned title track.. this one is a perfect example of music crafted around the title of the song. It builds from a barely audible single-melody into a stirring wall of sound, then falls back to near-silence and back again across the space of nearly 11 minutes. "Bearer Of The Flame" and "Niobe" are somewhat more straightfoward, driven by a synthetic timpani propelling soundtrack-like waves of symphonic melody, while Elizabeth's vocals wail and soothe as required. "Takhesis Dance" is a pure folk instrumental, while "Ancestors Of Stone" is probably the catchies song on the album, being more vocal orientated than the rest. The digipak-only bonus track, "The Halls Of Dargaard", hearkens back to the older material, sounding less structured and more inclined towards building an atmosphere through repetition.

Overall, if you're looking to get your head kicked in, this is not the album for you. In fact, anyone looking for metal in any shape or form will be sorely disappointed. However, this band is a perfect example of how metal musicians can branch out into different forms of expression without becoming horribly redundant and pathetic. Ulver, Anathema, The Gathering, Paradise Lost, Katatonia and their ilk can all fuck right off and drown in a lake of
goat's urine. Come to think of it, you don't need to be open-minded at all to appreciate this stuff. Because it's actually good music.