Sovereign Nocturnal

I think you know from coming within one hundred feet of this album that the question isn't whether there will be nature samples, but just how much of the album is going to be taken up by them (answer: about five minutes total). Yes, Velnias is another one of those... *shudder* post-rock black metal bands that are all the rage these days with the scruffily bearded legions who attend Wolves In The Throne Room concerts with clove cigarettes in hand. Velnias is notable for actually playing the softest and most gentle form of the style possible, like their brittle little bones will break if they play anything heavy. It's not particularly bad music but it's so fucking lame it's almost painful to listen to; this is like the soundtrack to a performance of Circe De Souile in the forest.

Like all post-rock influenced music, this is entirely based around arduously slow buildups towards a climactic release of tension; dynamics are important as is a precise sense of melody. The buildups sound closer to Pelican than anything, which isn't a bad thing; I do like Pelican a lot (at least pre-'City Of Echoes'). The problem is how goddamn slowly everything moves; just when you think the band is starting to get louder and approach something kind of heavy, they immediately scale it back to another clean guitar passage with toms. It takes forever for any of the three songs to go somewhere metallic. I guess calling this significantly influenced by black metal is something of a misnomer; it's significantly influenced by the newest Wolves In The Throne Room material which is a second cousin of black metal at best. All the music here sounds like it's vaguely a part of the metal scene but not really directly influenced by anything significantly metallic, and it arrives at a kind-of sort-of heavy sound mostly coincidentally rather than out of any desire to make heavy music.

So okay, the band is fond of slow post-metal buildups and a seemingly endless array of fiddly clean guitar and drum passages. Are the climaxes interesting? I guess; they're louder than the rest of the stuff and the screaming and growling (which is infrequent at best; the material is mostly instrumental) gets the most intense during those passages, but the melodies are the same sort of atmospheric sludge thing you've heard a lot of times before, but this time it's laced with nature samples and black metal screeching. The riffs are right in the middle of the post-metal morass of weird chord shapes that *almost* go somewhere but can never commit because moving in a straight line at any time is for people less intelligent than post-metal fans. Not moving in a straight line is okay, but don't just move in circles! One of the principles of the post-metal style is to take the scenic route to the climax, but Velnias just takes the climax as another part of the route and doesn't give it the significance it really needs to capture the audience's attention.

This album is actually better almost objectively when listened to as background music; there's almost never enough actually going on to hold your attention for more than a minute or two. Maybe I'm just the sort of primitive person who doesn't understand the exquisite intricacies of music like this, and so I'd imagine that post-metal and Wolves In The Throne Room fans should probably give this a try. I never find it particularly interesting, though, no matter how many times I listen to it.