A Dream of Nightskies

This album should be a fantastic album. However, it is merely an average album bordering on the good. I think that out of all the albums I've heard that use a drum machine, this one has to be the one with the most intrusive and the most mood destroying sound. Having said that, this band does show a lot of promise.


Anyway, starting with the good; the guitars. The simplest way for me to describe the style of writing and the sound of the guitars would be by saying that they sound like a cross between Abyssic Hate and Seigneur Voland with the occasional muffled clean tone guitar thrown in that sounds like it's been lifted from a Xasthur album. There isn't a fixed number of guitars and more come in or are lost when necessary. However, the redeeming feature of this album isn't the sounds of the guitars, which is pretty good anyway, but the sheer quality and quantity of the riffs. The two aforementioned bands, Abyssic Hate and Seigneur Voland, tend to have some sort of structure to their songs with about five or six riffs. The number of riffs per song on this album is easily in the double figures. And it's not just that which makes this something special to me as the songs starts, or fades in, with one riff and it evolves into the next one and so on by adding a lead part and then changing the rhythm slightly or vice versa. Of course, whole songs aren't evolutions of riffs, just quite a lot of it. Anyway, needless to say there is absolutely no structure; no verses or choruses in this album, just a massive amount of riffs.

The vocals are the first drawback to this album. Firstly, I don't see the point of vocals for a project such as this (I never understood the vocals in Abyssic Hate in case you're wondering), and secondly, they're pretty shitty anyway. They're merely a half hearted broken rasp/whisper that adds nothing to the music. In fact, I'm fairly convinced that they were written and added on as an afterthought as something they felt was "needed". Luckily, they are used very sparsely on this album, so it's not a huge drawback.

However, the main detractor of this release and the reason that I'm giving it such a low score is the horrendous drum machine. Even if they tried I don't think they could've found a more obnoxious sound. It just doesn't fit with the music or the mood of the album as the guitars have the fragile, almost delicate sound that is associated with such "depressive" Black Metal bands, and yet they've elected to go with an extremely obvious drum machine that pounds loudly away in the foreground. It really is so annoying and very nearly ruins the album completely as when the double kick and the crash cymbal gets going it almost drowns the guitars out which in my opinion are the biggest selling point of this release. Also, the beats are your standard Burzum beats, so why they didn't simply get a drum kit, or even just shopped around and brought a decent drum machine and took some time over it is beyond me. If they'd taken the drum sound from Nocturnal Poisoning by Xasthur, this album would probably have got 90% at the very least.

(For those who pretty much trust THR to put out brilliant releases every time, you may have brought Lutomysl's I'mquintessence album. That is exactly the same drum sound that Enthroning Silence use. If you've brought or heard it, you'll probably get an idea of just how inappropriate they would be for a band writing in the same vein as Abyssic Hate).


In conclusion, Enthroning Silence are a very promising band with a myriad of good ideas and certainly some skill in the song writing department. All they need to do is to buy another drum machine and learn how to use it, or alternatively learn how to play the drums. The vocals I can tolerate but shoddy drum machines I can't. Although this is still a listenable album, it is the epitome of an otherwise excellent album being dragged down by a drum machine. I really hope that if they write a follow up they make an improvement. If they do, it'll be an excellent album.