Immersion Trench Reverie

While Yellow Eyes hail from Brooklyn, they certainly don't sound like it. Immersion Trench Reverie was recorded in a cabin in Connecticut and partially conceived on a trip to Siberia. The album has much more of a rural European feel than anything to do with the art kid hipsters with trust funds Brooklyn stereotype. Atmosphere is a big part of their sound and the field recordings here go far deeper than the stock nature noises a vast number of lazier black metal bands have used. Vaguely dissonant and more rickety than your great grandmother, Yellow Eyes can be surprisingly uplifting. While they don't stray drastically far off the well-treaded path, they colour just far enough outside the lines to breathe fresh life into a very established sound.

While their mix of moderately dissonant chords and slow-burning non-sugary melody reminds me of a good chunk of the Icelandic black metal scene, the alpine atmosphere and rickety feel reminds me a lot of Polish black metal band Wędrujący Wiatr's sophomore album. The guitars tend to oscillate between slow burning, almost doomy swirls of distortion and more uplifting melodic guitar lines. There's an excellent sense of pacing and songwriting, which manifests in a way that actually reminds me of Batushka. The drumming is cool; lots of booming rickety blasts and whatnot. The dude makes good use of the cymbals, too. The rasps are fierce and unhinged. Kind of reminds me of what you'd get from the better DSBM bands, but if they were coming from a place of strength instead of self-pity.

While there are lots of neat riffs and melodies, atmosphere is a major player in Yellow Eye's sound. While the lo-fi fuzzy guitars do give off a lot of this, the field recordings are instrumental in giving this album a special character deeply intertwined with the lives of its creators. There's these amazing bell sections and orthodox chants recorded in Siberia that go a long way to add a special atmosphere to this. When the brothers went to Siberia, they said there were wild dogs everywhere. There was a crated pen of wild dogs right next to where they were sleeping and at night they would go ham and attack each other. These dogs are sampled at the end of "Velvet on the Horns"- a pretty damn cool way to add their personal experiences to an album in a way that still fits the atmosphere.

Immersion Trench Reverie is among the better black metal albums to come out this year, and it's not hard to pick up on how heartfelt Yellow Eyes are with their music. You've got this really engrossing atmosphere going, awesome guitar lines that simultaneously play with dissonance and melody, not to mention the strongest use of sampling on a black metal album in a hot minute. If you like atmospheric black metal, but don't want atmosphere to be the entire point of the music, look no further.