Заревом над прахом / Like a Blaze Above the Ashes

Forest play a very severe and highly militaristic (and needless to say, aggressive!) style of black metal with extremely fast and relentless drum rhythms and equally frrenetic tremolo guitar buzz. The vokillist sounds very distant and harsh to point of hoarseness. The first two tracks have fairly simple and repetitive structures based completely around the guitar riffs with the bass pushing the music along; they don't sound very different from one another though the second track does change quite a bit as it goes along. Some listeners might find these pieces monotonous as they tear along at breakneck speed, the guitars forming a continuous blizzard of distorted noise and the drumming seeming inhuman and menacing; for other listeners, the music can be trancey and hypnotic for the same reasons.

The real glory of this cd is the third track "To The Fiercest Frost" which divides into three parts. First up is a long and very noisy distorted guitar fuzz passage that is so raw and jagged it could strip paint off walls, accompanied sometimes by a trilling balalaika. True, this section doesn't go anywhere much except in circles but there is a tragic, almost dramatic air about it which I find thrilling. The second movement is a slow and solemn rhythmic marsh of very bluesy, steely guitar melodies beyond which there is distant and impassioned singing. This is a very moving section: the singing is heart-felt and despite the repetitive nature of the music there is a majestic and lofty ambience which is also very sad. A burst of guitar noise ends this movement and the third part of the track becomes a fast-flowing vibrato guitar drone.

Track 4, "Obscurity", is another surprise: black metal with (well, nearly) operatic singing! A doleful guitar melody with clear tones repeats over and over while a lone baritone voice treated with echo croons in sorrow for fallen soldiers whose bodies will soon disappear beneath snow and frost. Sounds all quite pretentious I know but the austere approach of the song and the musical repetition impose restraint on a piece that could easily become sentimental and melodramatic. Towards the end, the music seems to break or fade out before going into an all-instrumental outro and I wonder whether this was intentional or the result of poor editing; it is difficult to say with much Russian BM, we cannot assume all Russian metal bands, especially those outside the big cities like Moscow and St Petersburg (Forest hail from Tula which is about 200 miles south of Moscow), have access to good quality instruments and recording facilities.

Uneven in quality perhaps and very lo-fi in sound quality and other technical details and so maybe not suited to those who want tighter and more professional musicianship, I find this recording has a dignity and restrained emotion appropriate to its theme of war and the suffering of those called upon to fight for their country. I'm aware of the band's neo-fascist beliefs and associations but they are not obvious (to me anyway) on this album.