An international project between Sweden and New Zealand, this is the fourth full length from this atmospheric black metal entity. I was expecting something a bit more in the way of epic riffs out of this band for some reason, and there are a few, but they're understated and not necessarily big and bombastic like I was expecting. The clean female vocals are perhaps the best part of this record, breathlessly performed and majestic. It puts the album much more in the vein of gothic metal than black metal. I might actually respect this more if they got rid of the growled vocals and went totally clean. I just feel like stuff like this loses sight of what black metal was meant to be in the first place, a fist in the face of the mainstream and the morality police, and by making it accessible like this, boiling it down to a musical style instead of an accompanying ideology, misses the overall point. But I digress. Note that my above criticism in no way means that the music isn't enjoyable. It is. Very much so. Just not from a traditional black metal perspective, a perspective shared by the underground for decades. There's no ugliness here, only dark beauty, and that runs counter to what I want in the genre, even on the atmospheric and epic side of things. I know, I have complicated thoughts on non-traditional black metal. It is what it is. I'll file this under gothic metal and be satisfied with it.
