III

Nice stumbling upon this. Reminds me of when I didn't have kids and I could sit down and listen to long, extremely inaccessible albums. I got no idea where my Disembowelment vinyl or Njiqhdda vinyls are- perhaps it's time to dust them off and annoy the shit out of my wife. Anyway, yeah, 6 years on from this thing, it's still very good and I'm sure I'm not the only one who had forgotten about this beast- highly recommend we all get back onboard.

I like the way SL write their riffs, a few exceptions aside (that super fun tremelo riff in The Cold March...) it's like the riffs are scattered over minutes, these huge, long, kinda deconstructed things, where smaller riffs reside. Like a fractal mixed with a hermit crab? ?? There's plenty of blasting, and I think that's where things are best, coming through with a bit of that triumphant greek sound mixed with a buncha proggy semi-dissonant chords. If you like arpeggios then boy oh boy are you in for a good time. Fair bit of black, doomy trudge as well, which to be honest I find pretty boring but it's not **everywhere**. There's a few nicely melodic moments, little speckles of sweet and light everywhere. That quitet part of Cold March is pure Explosions in The Sky introduction sorta thing.

Certainly, credit to the man behind this for jamming stuff everywhere in it. Ideas develop into other things, ideas come and go at a rapid rate, but the songs still hold together fairly well. Shoutout to the Morricone-doing-a-Mass-Effect vibe of Drifting Through Moss and Ancient Stone. There's a bit too critique in the fairly faceless, rather pointless vocals- forceful enough, but a bit vague and amorphous in their constant, way down in the mix delivery. You could definitely argue for punchier distorted guitars, as they're fairly bedroom-y and mushy in their delivery, which is a bit odd compared to the fairly nice sounding acoustics and all that. If it was a deliberate choice, it wasn't a good one. But that's a nitpick, honestly.

It's a really nice album, it's an extremely immersive album. Put it on, time stops. I reckon a good cross-media analogy would be something like The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe, whereby if you really dig into it than yes it's a pretty dense and weird thing, but it can also just be enjoyed with your brain turned off and thinking happy things. I'm sick of my brain being full of climate change, horrible wars in distant lands and historically unmatched inequality. Give me a fucken stork, a spiral tower and whatever other stuff is on that gloriously cooked cover art.

Just nice listening to a long, looooong bit of atmo black that's a bit uplifting and triumphant here and there, yknow? And this album does it far, far better than most. Perhaps at some point I'll be able to get away and listen to it on a starlit beach for a few hours or something. As it stands, it's still rather nice playing it while chilling at home on my computer chair. Overlooked classic, I reckon.