Heimkehr

In Dornen is a solo project of one musician (Wolfgang Kronsteiner) hailing from Austria: as of 2023, the project also has another guitarist, originally a member of Epsilon. The project released allegedly four studio albums so far, including one that harks back from 2009. I say "allegedly" because the first album, 2009's Isolation, apparently disappeared from the web, and only two of its tracks were re-published on Bandcamp, while the others are still missing. The other issue is that the fourth album, 2023's Trauer, is LONGER than this seconds studio album, 2022's Heimkehr, but is classified as an EP. Moreover, the project was formed in 2008, but after releasing a demo and a collaborative split in 2011, they virtually went on hiatus until 2022, without disclosing the reason.

Setting history issues aside, the project's second album, Heimkehr, barely qualifies as a full-length, because, taking the intro and the outro apart, it doesn't even lasts 27 minutes, so it's a very short, snapping release. Einklang starts things off with a monotone C# synth pad drone with sounds of creaking doors, hushed vocals and cuckoo verses, and Hoamat kicks things off with quiet chorus clean guitar suddenly morphing into a lo-fi, lazily recorded non-muted distorted drone that goes at times totally out of sync with the drum programming and at times more in time, while the drumming delves into slower ballad-like paces, blast-beating and some rhythmic twists derived from post-hardcore: a piano drone with German speech serves as a coda. Also, the sections are abruptly cut with disappearing instruments, inconstant vocal that seem more overdubbed than recorded and non-symmetric beat division.

The following tracks feature similarly absurd cut-and-paste arrangements, ranging from quiet drones with distant pads and spoken-word, sudden, loud bursts of volume, atonal piano string picking with delay-driven vocals (Nachts), changing set of plug-ins during double-bass sections, acoustic guitar solo picking over windy soundscapes (Herbst) and mid-tempo ultra-distorted two note drones (Eisamkeit), which sounds totally out of place among the rest. Winterkälte is the one that features more blast-beating black metal tremolos, but the execution is sloppy and minimal like Ildjarn, so don't expect anything fully constructed. At least, however, they sound more on time.

As soon as the second track came in, I suddenly doubted the album's nature as a "studio album". In fact it doesn't seem like a collection of songs or melodic material of any sort, but rather a hodge-podge of field recordings, forgotten demos re-discovered while cleaning the ceiling stitched together for the sake of releasing them and generic noodling. Were it promoted as a drone/noise project like Daniel Menche's discography, it would be probably considered higher, but since the project is promoted as being black metal/ambient, well, you guys totally missed it. And I'm not only referring to the band members, but also to the label which distributed this release, Dominance of Darkness Records: spending a few words to help categorize this stuff would be welcomed. As it is, it's merely a senseless jam session with no trace of melody or musicality. This album's hapazard nature amazes me even more when I think about how their third album, 2022's Verg​ä​nglichkeit, sounds like the total opposite of this one.