Ancestral Mysteries

In 2021 Kataxu made a very discreet comeback, which proves how overrated this artist is because basically nobody remembered him and nobody seemed to care that he spent 16 years in absolute silence. And against all expectations, Piąty surprisingly released his best work under this name to date.

I'm not sure why this Kataxu album works better than the previous ones, maybe it's because their approach is the most functional they've done, this being, by far, the most guitar driven album of the project, the keyboards are no longer the musical basis nor are they so intrusive, they are simply limited to reinforce the atmosphere in the most punchy moments. The compositions have also gained by being less ambitious and working on smaller parameters, focusing more on very defined and concrete aspects that help to make everything more accessible in general, as everything seems more cohesive. You could say that the style is no longer so bombastic and grandiloquent, subjectively the music has a more introspective feel to it, and it's thanks to that that the more subtle keyboards can work.

The production is quite amateurish, but rather than sounding kvlt and raw, it seems to be the result of limited resources, but I have to admit that this is far from affecting negatively the final result, in fact it adds sharpness to the outcome, making the guitars sound much more reverberant, where every riff feels like a real thunder, which also suits Piąty's vocal performance, sounding much rougher and deeper fitting (unconsciously perhaps) perfectly with the sound produced by the rest of the instrumentation.

One of the aspects that has been kept from the original essence of Kataxu is the way of ordering the songs, following a simple scheme of songinterludesong and so on. I have never been a big fan of this tendency by Piąty, or rather how he approached it, as it used to result in the synth sound having an excessive amount of minutes when this used to be the least interesting section musically speaking. But here, with the more straight forward style in the first half of the album this works incredibly well, "Beyond the Atlantean Gate" and "Our Lady of Oblivion" are two of the best songs Kataxu has done, its electric rhythm, its powerful drums, gives a magnificent sample of a potential that until now Kataxu had kept hidden, and with this performance of pure power on the one hand, causes that those interludes tracks of more atmospheric and relaxing mood fit much better. But this is ruined in the last segment of the album, "The Black Sun Shines" is an almost exclusively slow and atmospheric piece, focused on minimalistic aspects that progress in an articulate and inexorable way, it is not in itself a horrible song, but it drags for to long and the two breaks are insufficient and unbelievably short to make the overall feeling more dinamic. Plus the last few minutes of the track are exactly an outro that already sounds the same way these atmospheric interludes themselves, so the whole final segment feels artificially lengthened and doesn't really get there at all.

Not really knowing how to end the review, I just want to point out that an album of barely forty minutes has fifteen minutes of pure filler and yet it is the best album of the project, which says it all about the rest of their discography.