The Child Must Die

This is one of my favorite black metal albums in my CD collection honestly. And I honestly wish I would play it a lot more than I do! It's almost criminal.

Specifically, this album is sort've ambient black metal, the ambient bits of it looming eerily in the background of the sinister and at times epic sounding black metal riffs for the most part, and other times it adds to the occasional epic quality to the sound. The drum work is very good, much better than in the first album. In the first album, Synkaa Tuuli, a drum machine is being used, but in this, fortunately, a real drummer is being used, which sounds much more natural.

This album has been compared to in the night side eclipse by Emperor, and I can see the slight resemblance, but in my personal opinion... It's done even better! although both are phenomenal black metal releases, however I'd say I personally like this album even better in all honesty.

The production contributes to the harsh and cold sound. While it's not extremely raw, it is pretty raw for your typical atmospheric or ambient black metal. The bass work is fantastic, and I don't typically have an ear for bass work for the most part at this point, although I am starting to recognize it more. For example in the fourth track, feast of the north farm, I remember hearing a very epic sounding bass line as a vicious and evil sounding guitar riff is being played, and even before I noticed the bass work in that song it was one of my favorite tracks.

The vocals are especially evil sounding. They mostly tend to be very high pitched vicious shrieks, to the occasional low growls, or possibly even low crooning clean vocals, like in wondrous sampo, the first track; It's hard to tell but it sounds great either way. One track early on in the album has a specific point in the song where the vocalist sounds possessed... Which is the only way I can describe it honestly. I can't really think of the track it was where it happened, but I can point it out if I were listening to it at this very moment.

Lastly there are the lyrics. I don't ordinarily read along to lyrics, and unfortunately I haven't totally read these lyrics in depth, but they do seem very interesting, being about mostly Finnish heritage and possibly Finnish mythology it seems? I'm not an expert on Finnish mythology, but I do remember looking up some of the names mentioned in some of the songs such as sampo and finding out they happened to be part of Finnish mythology, which always interesting to me, since I've always had an interest in mythology. I'm hoping to remember to read along with the lyrics next time I listen to this album.

Overall, this is a nearly perfect album in my eyes as far as black metal goes. If you like cold, evil, raw, vicious yet at the same time, epic atmospheric or ambient black metal, this album is for you. It is not the typical ambient or atmospheric black metal album that sounds beautiful and soothing(although I do love stuff like that too), but it's a very sinister sounding masterpiece, and I highly recommend it. It's probably one of my favorite releases of 2015, and I feel like it's very overlooked.