Laurestine

This might well be the single most perfect CD ever recorded, in any genre. Below, I will try to justify this bold, I admit, statement.

What are you looking for in music? Whatever this is, this album has it all: beautiful harmonies and punishing aggression, harsh vocals and gorgeous strings; it has flow and it has depth; it has dynamics and melody; it is extremely well composed and played. Musically speaking, what we have here is post-hardcore/black metal backed up by strings. The reason why it works so well is because the riffs/themes are very fluid, by which I mean that they are not based on repetition, but rather on subtle iterations and transformations normally associated with symphonic forms. For this reason, despite the harsh nature of the music itself, there is no clash between the two layers.

As all great albums do, "Laurestine" works well as a whole. The tracks have no gaps between them, the music unfolds gradually, and around the fourth track it gets ever so subtly but surely more and more unrelenting, and by the end of track six all the heart-wrenching melodies start to swirl around you in a very satisfying manner.

I have to admit that listening to this album made me realize how much (black) metal as a genre has changed. The music is hardly ground-breaking as far as new (sub-)genres are concerned, but it merges various elements already established in metal in a way that is quite unlike anything I heard before. There are the strings and the classically-inspired compositions mentioned before, but on closer listens you can also notice that the drums do not tend to switch between blast beats and slower sections, as you would expect. Instead, they are cymbal-heavy and rely on accenting chord changes and melody. Also, there are some post-rock elements (Mono is the reference point here), but they are not as obvious as in the case of most post-black metal bands (Harakiri for the Sky and the likes) and show themselves mostly in the melodies themselves and the general feel of the music.

The sound of the album can be best described as 50% “For My Parents” (Mono) and 50% “Sunbather” (Deafheaven) filtered through “Weather Systems” (Anathema).

All in all, a mandatory listen for anyone interested in new things happening in metal, not to mention al the post-[insert sub genre] metal fans.