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Production: Distant and indistinct, but tones are beautiful and tarnished by an acoustical journey which benefits the dark and dissonant nature of this music.
Review: Masterfully paced music unfolds its choreographies in chant rhythms and distant harmonies while maintaining impossibly slow speeds and repeating riffs and patterns in slowly evolving puddles of sound, then changing mood rapidly to a different riff and different flow, but same liquidity. So slow, very slow, with keyboards washing up behind the (simple but not utterly linear) riffs, power chords abrading each other behind the electronic curtain of slickness. Drums are mostly the pounding of the tom or selective percussion effects for dramatic purpose, and bass guitar remains indistinguishable from the grating six-string sound.
Skepticism fails to break any epic or progressive ground with these simple songs and often only creates successfully mellow background music which moves like the soundtrack to a Roman war movie, a dragging rhythm and melodic simplicity. Trudge beats and long pauses of silence of fading keyboard leave a further ambience suspended around the record; everyday rhythms seem out of place, too alive, too fast in comparison to this gauntlet of dirge. Riffs are simple elements that break apart to form a song in a pace extruded to leave the impression of complexity in iteration, but one of the better parts of the rhythm is the utterly low and rolling voice that breaks forth in proclamation pace over the normal riffing.
Without a long attention span you will be lost for this album, but your long attention span must be sufficiently short to enjoy the simple elements of a large composition. It is fair to say this music should be taken as an album and not song by song, as each tune tends to flow into the next through ambient noise and dark silence. The illustration here is inexactly cut because it is distinguished by obscurity and vagueness in the music rather than by definitive statement; intensely romantic and wistful, this music pauses on each consideration like a chewer of an emotional mouthful of brief patterns. Not bad for doom metal so slow it would be relegated to suicide soundtrack.
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