The Forsaken Spirit

Between the first album "The Darkest Shrines" and its follow-up "The Forsaken Spirit", over two years were to pass: enough time perhaps for one-man BM act Malaöun to refine its style from sharp and angular, and maybe a little awkward in its transitions within songs, to a much more streamlined and flowing music. Aggression there still is and lots of it in the vocals, the guitar noise showers and the furious blast-beat percussion. The music is less sharp than I remember, and the ambience is more sinister. Death metal elements on the first album have now been ironed out. This new Malaöun seems a darker, bleaker and more menacing entity than before. What has stayed the same, apart from the ragged ghostly vocals, is the impression Malaöun gives of being on the edge of chaos and insanity.

The album begins hard and strong with "The Eternal Haze" which sets the standard for the rest of the album to follow: an emphasis on riffs, many of them very pop-friendly, several changes of pace and beats with the triggered percussion often going much faster than the guitar melodies, and near-phantom vocals wailing and croaking dense lyrics behind the roaring music. The result is lengthy songs that seem constantly to change almost right up to the end and which are not very distinct from one another.

With just four songs coming in at just under half an hour, "The Forsaken Spirit" is best heard in its entirety: while the songs can seem much the same and might be treated as connected chapters, the album gets its identity from the combined four tracks. Lyrics dwell on personal suffering and longing for death or an elusive shadowy love. While the music on individual tracks can be good and the level of musicianship is consistent, over nearly 30 minutes the music has very few surprises and the boredom level goes higher from one track to the next. At the end of the album, listeners might feel they've hardly budged from the beginning: with the range of instruments being small, the vocals just as limited in their expression and having to plough through the lyrics, and the music packing in as many melodies and changes in pace as possible, full emotional and sonic immersion in "The Forsaken Spirit" and its world of dark desire and suffering is hard, especially for first-time listeners.

The lyrics, while very visual and evocative, might be too purple-prose lurid for fans and would-be followers, and I'd prefer that they be more streamlined and direct in their message. This would put less pressure on ML's singing and open up another role for the vocals as an essential sonic layer in Malaöun's music, perhaps to help set a particular mood or atmosphere.

I'm hoping that "The Forsaken Spirit" is an experimental detour in creating a more flowing, noisy style of melodic BM with dissonant chords and a mystery atmosphere, and that on the next album Malaöun recaptures some of the original blackened death metal style from the first full-length.