Lights in the Howling Wilderness

One of the more surprising non-metal instruments that make occasional appearances in black metal must surely be the mouth harp which pops up once or twice on this second album by the trio Jassa, two of whose members are also part of Sivyj Yar, a couple of whose albums I've reviewed in the past. What's that about living in a small world? Funny how the more you travel around the world - even the world of black metal - you find yourself ending up in the same place twice, even three times.

The album begins in very fine if eerie shamanistic style with a quavering trance vocal over a sonically dense layer of hard-hitting drums, grinding steel guitars and twangy mouth harp ("When the Serpent Devours the Sun"). From here on in, listeners are taken on a super-fast blackened death ride of scrabbling tremolo strings and pounding drums, over which there is an astonishing array of vocals: harsh black metal, deep guttural death metal and low booming throat singing. The throat singing fits very well into the music, its low smooth drones contrasting with the raspy tone of the guitars and the brittle percussion. Keyboards provide a deeply ominous drone-wash background to the otherwise thin music.

While songs feature good melodies and riffs, and lots of head-banging moments for true metalheads, put together on one album the tracks aren't all that distinct from one another. Running at the same speed, with each song packing in as much melody and riffing as can fit and rarely repeating significant motifs, doesn't help individual tracks. Only if they feature something really out of the ordinary, such as a robotic chant near the end ("Crescent Moon over Dark Water") might tracks really stand out. As the album continues, the music tends to become more generic melodic blackened death and the ambient elements and other unique aspects like the mouth harp and the throat singing that would lift Jassa head and shoulders above the band's competition are sidelined.

You might not remember much of individual tracks but you'll certainly remember Jassa's energy and enthusiasm in belting out such dense music and those occasional moments of quirky shamanic individuality with the mouth harp and the unearthly throat singing. If these guys could just slow down a little enough to write and compose songs with distinct and catchy riffs and tunes, incorporate more pre-Christian Slav or other heathen elements into their work, and not leave the more ambient effects to the beginnings and ends of songs (which tend also to drain the life out of the songs too), they could be a great trio worth revisiting many times over and their world would be one listeners would rarely leave.