The Ashes of Light

Lustre exist at that point where highly melodic and symphonic black metal departs and ambient music steps up. It’s always been one possible direction for black metal to take ever since Varg recorded ‘Hvis lyset tar oss’ and Summoning put out ‘Dol Guldur’. But where those albums stripped black metal down to a minimalist ambient core to discover the true narrative potentials locked within, the hordes of bedroom black metal projects that followed were concerned with timbre and aesthetics and nothing more. Being inspired in no small part by some video game music, it’s hardly surprising that they would gut the creative core from this music leaving only a collection of sounds without context, and skeletal, half-formed concepts.

Whilst the Paysage d’Hivers of the world pushed the limits of noise within a fundamentally epic black metal framework, Sweden’s Lustre opted for a more melodic approach. Tracks usually consist of a few simple keyboard arpeggios, with suppressed guitars filling out the texture, and bare-bone drum tracks. Black metal vocals are retained, along with distorted guitars, but this is probably where we leave metal behind entirely into ambient territory.

The reception in the metal community, much like Lustre albums themselves, has always been lukewarm. The latest offering ‘The Ashes of Light’ does not stray too far from this apparently winning formula. It’s true that the first half is positively upbeat, with almost lively drumbeats, and some pretty busy keyboard lines by Lustre standards. But the general formula to the music has not changed despite the beefed-up tempos. Whilst the individual passages and refrains are characterised by more notes, more trills, and more layers, the actual progression of each track still proceeds at a glacial pace, each passage is dwindled on for just as long. So it would be a mistake to label this as a break with the past by any stretch. That being said, the murky, cumbersome bulk to this music, burdened by echo and reverb, does coalesce around what could loosely be described as a driving beat, melodic keyboards, clockwork like in their repetition, almost calling to mind a dreamy 80s synthpop vibe.

The question then becomes – as with a lot of highly stylised music that clearly sets out with a very specific aim – does it achieve what it set out to do? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’ if the only goal here is a pleasing, meditative, and dreamlike ambience. But too often is this question taken as an end. Setting a goal and achieving it is no metric of quality. But a lot of ambient can upon first listen strike one as music that focuses in on one moment in time, and expand upon this fixed point over the course of an album. When on repeated listens it can reveal itself to be a teasingly slow progression of an idea. The structure of a lot of ambient albums usually mirrors the process of entropy. As ‘The Ashes of Light’ plays itself out, those more upbeat, tighter rhythms gradually decay, with the occasional reprise, before the closing of the album where form finally disintegrates, and all that is left is a gaseous void. Slowly decaying an album from start to finish is nothing new and hardly a stroke of genius, but it tends to work very well for minimalist and ambient styles, for the simple reason that it signposts the listener through the album, and offers something beyond a pleasing yet structureless void.

That being said, we can’t go too far in crediting Lustre in this regard, other artists have taken a similar approach with far more drama and tension along the way. This could have been a winding and perilous road, but ‘The Ashes of Light’ is a safe, and predictable trail, one that is undoubtably scenic all the same. Lustre and many artists like him will continue to churn out albums like this, developing musically at about the same pace as their albums take to unfold, and someone will always be there to lap them up. For my money their appeal is very much based on context, the mood of the listener, the time of day etc. Unlike more timeless albums which work regardless of context, whose merits stretch to something more universal, ‘The Ashes of Light’ comes across as competent but one dimensional, brittle, hollow.

Originally published at Hate Meditations