Outland

Not for the first time and certainly not for the last have I decided to review an album based on its front artwork cover. In the case of Misertus' third album "Outland" - the third out of three released by the Manchester-based one-man blackgaze / post-BM project in five months - this is a very moody, even sinister rocky landscape with a cloudy sky coloured dark blue: a real contrast to the first album which featured a pink sky over an equally brooding landscape. On "Outland" though, the rocky outcrop seems to look over distant valley country and that may reflect the musical journey of "Outland", in which the songs have titles suggesting a lone traveller venturing out into nature with perhaps no known arrival point or predetermined route (or even the amount of time spent there) and carrying only the basic things needed for survival.

Compared to the first album "Daydream", this third release has more synthesiser, used both to imitate flute and as part of Misertus' general wall-of-sound style to add atmosphere and mood. There is more melody as well and parts of the album sound folk-influenced. Opening track "Vacillating Skies" is at once warm and serene in mood and overall sound yet still aggressive and sharp with later additions of raspy BM vocals and fuzz-metal tremolo guitars. This is a very blissful and dreamy instrumental piece - the vocals are set right in the middle of the song so they become another texture in the music - that sets the scene and tone for the rest of the album. Sure enough, "Wanderer" takes up the baton as if it were the second part of "Vacillating Skies" and continues with the massive layered sound and the serene uplifting mood. There may be dark or cold spots along the way - it is becoming typical of a Misertus piece now to include equal parts melancholy and optimism - but the momentum of the music and the associated mood are unstoppable. Even a cold aggressive track like "Blue Spirits" can't entirely eliminate the underlying optimistic mood and warmth - the steely aggression, the dark grandeur in slower sections of the music and the constant scowling vocals seem merely to reinforce their polar opposition. That may or may not have been the intention of the track but the battle between the forces of darkness and lightness is certainly an energetic and monumental one.

Into the second half of the album, the music is solid and a bit less epic though it gives the impression of treading water before the last couple of tracks which turn out to be the real highlights of the album in emotion, atmosphere and power. This part of the album is why we have slogged through the rest of the recording, though arguably we may have lost more than a few listeners tired from all the bludgeoning. The title track goes off on a dark path scaling towers of high emotional intensity and coming down equivalent valleys of despair where a lone melodic lead guitar sallies against walls of noise and death-rattle ghost voices. "Aether (A Distant Ember)", the longest track, sweeps away everything before it: it's a very powerful, perhaps too powerful, epic of icy BM tremolo guitar drone cathedrals, those drowning scratching voices, batteries of synth percussion and plaintive piano melodies. The best part though comes halfway where the music marches to a complete stop and a lone guitar picks its way through the darkness to join piano and orchestral synths on the other side of a huge abyss. From here on the music proceeds with grand majesty, glorious and rich in sonic texture, picking up energy and fighting spirit and managing to avoid sounding pompous and overblown.

The journey through this album is certainly arduous and while the music is very good and monumental without falling into pretentious bombast, it can be demanding on listeners' patience. The best part of the album is its last two tracks - the music here is at its most intense, the moods are at their most ambivalent and the sounds are the most mind-blowing in their variety and beauty - but you have to do a fair bit of work to get there and that means churning through filler tracks in the middle of the album. Perhaps this album is best recommended for folks who already have experience of ploughing through long droney and sometimes monotonous layered noisy recordings from acts like Canada's Nadja and the American BM-psychedelic project Njiqahdda.