Unalterable

Albums of this magnitude, thanks to the widespread access one has to solid recording programs and equipment, are becoming more and more common – though, certainly, they are still prodigious achievements to compose. Mist of Misery’s “Unalterable” clocks in at an extraordinary hour-and-forty-nine minutes, a runtime that is rarely attempted even by some of the most well-known and maniacally talented musicians in the genre. Considering this is more than double the length of their quite solid album “Absence,” the efforts undertaken by Mist of Misery in the break between these full-lengths must have been quite substantial. But the demands placed on the band are quite different from those placed on the listener: ultimately, what is it about “Unalterable” that demands such a runtime?

Unfortunately, it is not immediately clear. While from song to song there are usually good sections, songs like “Desolation” or “The Dying Light” are relatively void of surprises and fit within the annals of uninteresting, soporific atmospheric black metal. While much of the textures woven throughout “A Forest of Disenchantments” are quite eerie – particularly the wailing vocalizations that are expertly foregrounded at the song’s end – there is a great deal of unimaginative quarter-note repetitiveness in the instrumentation; these sorts of issues could have been avoided through the editing process. Moreover, the covers on “Unalterable” are, if anything, a distraction from whatever theme was being attempted on this massive double-album format: while covers can be expertly worked into the flow of a full-length (the cover of “Dunkelheit” on Utstott’s Járnviðr comes to mind), on “Unalterable” I’m not sure this works to the advantage of an already quite long release. Were the Coldworld and Dimmu Borgir covers axed, I doubt the album would have lost very much.

What this album does have going for it, certainly, is atmosphere. One is easily lost within its ghostly pallor, that does not evoke so much the frostbitten blackness of much black metal so much as a sullen, grim dusk. “Halls of Emptiness” is a blood-chilling piece of music: the central break, with bleak, mournful strings floating ghost-like upon the stark silence is a truly unsettling moment; the band then shatters this soundscape with the return to black metal instrumentals, underscored by reflective piano and violin. This song is a true display of what Mist of Misery is capable of. Later on this release “The Dying Light,” when the double-bass begins to bring the energy up and layers of instrumentation appear from the tedium of the nearly-hour-and-a-half mark of this release, drags the listener back into admiration at Mist of Misery’s obvious instrumental talents.

While the overall atmosphere of the album is chilling and the songwriting capable, “Unalterable” does suffer from a lack of imagination and some riffs that are simply retreading ground other bands have covered. This is not helped by the beginning of “Embracing Ruin,” which sounds eerily similar to the opening peddle on Mercyful Fate’s “Melissa” – I kept expecting King Diamond’s voice to enter over this intro. This is certainly an album that is meant to be a statement, if runtime is any indication. And while the execution of the bleak atmospheric black metal sound is expert, unfortunately the effort spent on editing is not. One cannot help but admire the ambition of this release, but if “Unalterable” is a lesson about anything, it is that an equal effort should be spent on editing as on writing.