Sojourner were a band I first discovered around the time of this album's release in 2018 at their debut show in Glasgow. Suffice to say, I went for Saor but left a major fan of Sojourner. The band have gone from strength-to-strength since then, I've seen them at four of their five UK shows now, but this album is one of the shining examples of atmospheric black metal that can nearly stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the greats.

'The Shadowed Road' sees Sojourner move from their rough-edged roots on 'Empires of Ash' into territory more polished in terms of production, songwriting, and instrumentation...helped in no small part by Øystein G. Brun's (of Borknagar fame) mixing, and the legendary Dan Swanö's mastering. This album shines in terms of setting an atmosphere seldom seen after the early 2000s. Some may find the album slightly too polished for the genre at times, as this is a very clean production, but in my eyes the band has reaped the rewards of being forward thinking enough to take atmospheric black metal out of its rut and into the more modern era of metal.

The album sees a synthesis of beautiful piano and keyboards worked in with riffing that wouldn't be out of place on a melodic death metal or doom metal record. There are heavy shades of Draconian, Insomnium, Swallow the Sun, and dare I even say Wintersun woven in throughout this endeavor. The tin whistle plays a huge part in the sound, lending a folky tone that never threatens to encroach into cheesy territory, and is performed in a tasteful and restrained manner. Everything about this album blew me away on first hearing it, and on writing this over 2 and a half years later, still blows me away.

There are certainly issues, which have largely been fixed on their more recent venture 'Premonitions', but which don't harm this style in any way. The male vocalist can be a little bit one-note at times, floating along at a mid-range rasp while occasionally dipping into low vocals, but never really moving out of his comfort zone. The other issue is the clean female vocals, while beautiful they tend to be slightly flat at times though this never detracts from the enjoyment of the album for me personally.

All in all, this album feels like it transports you to the scenery seen on it's stunning cover. The track highlights for me personally are the phenomenal, crushingly heavy second track, 'Titan', with lyrics penned by Draconian wordsmith Anders Jacobsson; the heartrendingly beautiful 'An Oath Sworn in Sorrow', with it's subtle and delicate piano and lead lines weaving around Bray and Crespo's best vocal performances in the band's history; and the stunning closing track, 'The Shadowed Road', which is both theatrical and anthemic. There are some aspect which stumble slightly, such as the oddly out of place 'Our Bones Among the Ruins' and the far-too-long 'Where Lost Hope Lies', but neither of these are bad songs by any means, they just keep that extra 5% off from perfect for me.

I could not recommend both this album and this band highly enough, and if you're yet to get on the Sojourner train then you're in for a treat!

This is my first ever negative review: Sojourner’s 2018 “The Shadowed Road.” Explaining why you dislike an album is difficult but here is my attempt. There are a myriad problems with this that add together to make an album which I could hardly bear to listen through once, let alone twice to review.

Firstly: the music is “atmospheric black metal”, though I feel that atmospheric post-black is a better description. The sound is the generic-est of “atmospheric post-black” sounds – attempting (an failing) to create a fantastical “blackened” atmosphere a la Summoning, Caladan Brood, Vvilerness and the like.

Here are the negatives:

It is simply bad execution, from the very first track the parts are there but the assembly is frankly insipid – the male black vocals seem misaligned with the music, the clean female vocals seem anaemic and flat, and also overshadowed by the instruments, feeling like someone is more whispering than singing. The problem with the male vocals can really see this on the second track – “Titan” – they just seem to clash with the music itself, like someone is singing out of time. It grates, and the more I hear it the more it grates. Combine that with the crude juxtaposition of male black and female clean vocals – I’m sure it is possible to do “beauty and the beast” style well on an album like this, but sadly this is not that album - it just comes across as jarring see-sawing back and fourth.

Songs are uninteresting, and compositionally I am lost – the structured progression through the songs simply is not there. Even with the first track I was actually relieved that it ended since it felt intolerable, trapped on on the shadowed road to nowhere as the drawn out piano outro/track-bridge at the end finally finished. And again, the timing failures come in here Track 2 – “Titan” seems to have multiples instances where instruments and vocals clash with misjudged timings, and in the end it just sort of ends without having gone anywhere. And there’s 51 minutes of this.

Synth melodies and guitar riffs are generic, failing with the uplifting, soaring necessity of this sort of music - the atmospheric in atmospheric (post-)black metal. I feel less transported to the “Shadowed Road” than I do to a traffic jam on the M25 Ringroad. Piano melodies deserve an ignoble mention for being some of the dullest I have had the displeasure of listening to, plinking and plonking away with no end in sight.

A special also mention to the nauseating tin whistle that farts in the background on almost every track – this is what drove me mad when listening to Summoning’s “With Doom We Come” (though in that case it was a harpsicord that gave me nightmares) – instrumental elements that clash with the rest of the music, nails on chalkboard style, allowing you to focus on nothing but how annoying they are. Again this can be done right – Summoning’s Dol Guldur and Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame, Caladan Brood’s Echoes of Battle – all have casio-symphony syndrome to more or less of an extent and are excellent albums, so the style is not irredeemable, just the execution.

A final mention that the lyrics, even by the low standards of “epic atmospheric black metal” are dull, dreary and generic. I’ve come to realize that Summoning and Caladan Brood work in part because they take a pre-existing fiction source as their lyric inspiration – bypassing any sort of “world building” required to make this sort of stuff work – triggering emotions by connecting back to the inspirational source. Power metal can so often get away with “generic epic” lyrics because of its catchy cheese riffs and sing-a-long choruses, atmospheric black has to do something else. The Shadowed Road doesn’t have that – so all its left with is meaningless milquetoast subpar Nightwish lyrics without even the earworm appeal.

Overall, its just a feeling you get when you listen to this – none of it works – and yet a similar album in a similar style can. It’s very hard to put your finger on it. Passionless and sterile, emotionally robotic, poorly composed, poorly mixed/timed, dull piano/synth interludes and intros, uninspired riffs and melodies, irritating and flat vocals, irritating synths, god-awful tin whistle, plastic feel, misjudged timings, crappy execution, insipid lyrics – I could go on but I just feel mean at this point. I wanted to like this, since the style is one of my favorites, but alas I am compelled to trash it; sorry Sojourner.

Least interesting tracks: all of them, though the last two tracks are marginally better than the rest.

It’s safe to say that, as soon as it was announced, Sojourner’s sophomore album ’The Shadowed Road’ instantly became my most anticipated album of the year so far. When I first heard their debut album, ‘Empires of Ash’, I’d never heard anything of the sort before, and was entranced and blown away beyond all expectation. Having listened to that album so much, and having now familiarised myself with the atmospheric black metal scene, I certainly had certain sky high and subjective expectations going into this new album, so I’m perhaps not as objective as I should be.

With production by Øystein Garnes Brun (Borknagar) and Dan Swanö (yeah, that Dan Swanö), there is very little to fault. As is best with melodic music, the vocals are prominent and intelligible, the guitars have a rich tone - the lead tone in particular stands out as one of the finest I’ve heard in recent memory, and I’m not even a guitar nut - and everything is balanced fantastically. There are certainly occasions when there’s a lot going on; for example, the middle section of closer “The Shadowed Road” features twin guitar melodies, twin vocal harmonies and a flute. Whilst this is the closest the mix gets to being muddy, it’s by no means badly done, and every instrument retains its own space to shine.

Enough preamble; what about the music itself? With high expectations, I dived into the first half of the album and came away a little… underwhelmed? Opener “Winter’s Slumber” showcases some vintage Sojourner, with a piano-led intro, tin whistle melodies and sliding leads before hitting you with a driving harsh verse. It’s a solid track, but doesn’t exactly showcase enough variety to justify the 7.30 runtime. “Titan” and “Ode to the Sovereign”, the second and third tracks, tread a similar path, seemingly staying within the territory that “Empires of Ash” carved out for itself. Indeed, the second half of the latter track feels like a continuation of “Homeward” from the first album, down to the chord sequence and instrumental combinations.

However, at this point in the experience, I don’t feel dissatisfied. Whilst all three tracks could easily have fit onto ‘Empires’, there’s a palpable sense of something new about each of them, hinting that Sojourner have some surprises up their sleeve, and enough to make it comfortably feel like this is the right album for Sojourner to be releasing after ‘Empires’. Vocalist Emilio Crespo frequently showcases a much improved vocal range on all three tracks, and the folk often leans towards a more melodeath feel than black. Furthermore, after remaining relatively standard stompy folk tune for much of its runtime, “Titan” ends with a jaw-dropping melodeath climax - nevertheless, it begs the question as to why the riff wasn’t incorporated earlier in the song though.

However, Sojourner have only just begun to showcase their potential. “An Oath Sworn in Sorrow” begins unassumingly, with the first two minutes seeming almost like a slower Omnium Gatherum song with lady vocals. This welcome change of pace develops well through the song, culminating with a fantastic climax featuring twin guitars; and the album goes to strength to strength from here. “Our Bones Among the Ruins” starts as an in-your-face full blown folk melodeath song, developing excellently towards a piano break in the last third - the song’s climax is more in line with classic Sojourner, but it feels refreshing due to its place in a well constructed song. It doesn’t hurt that the vocals are the best so far on the album either.

The two last tracks, “Where Lost Hope Lies” and “The Shadowed Road” both opt for intriguing openings, but take very different directions from there. “Where Lost Hope Lies” has some rhythmic similarities to “Aeons of Valor”, but plays heavily upon a heavy melodic death/doom vibe to create one of the most epic songs on the record. “The Shadowed Road” really is the standout track. The intro features Chloe Bray’s clean vocals in a vulnerable, ethereal manner, and this is undoubtedly the environment in which her voice is best suited. In some of the heavier passages, her voice isn’t powerful enough to cut through and occasionally feels thin, suffering from occasional pitching issues, but when stripped down in this bare, emotional intro, her voice shines and pulls you into Middle-Ear... uh, the song. Like “Ode to the Sovereign”, this song uses that same chord sequence from “Homeward”, yet the originality and ingenuity here, not to mention the power and melodeath influences, create a significantly more interesting result. The song drops back into ethereal territory in the second half, before hitting you with the jauntiest change of pace I’ve ever heard in an atmospheric album - thus ending the album in the highest possible spirits.

After repeated listens, I realised that my initial confusion after the first half of the album was through my thinking I wanted more ‘Empires’, but finding myself preferring the hints at a new direction. Those first tracks certainly grow on the listener when understood in the context of the album’s direction as a whole, although the second half remains the stronger section. It’ll be interesting to see where Sojourner go after this one. The band has progressed to a point where they’re clearly at their best when they apply their folk sensibilities to a meld of genres that doesn’t include the black metal of their origins; indeed, the weakest parts of the album are where they attempt to replicate ‘Empires of Ash’. Whilst many bands get criticised for leaving their roots behind, I fully hope Sojourner throw themselves at this new direction - I can’t think of any other bands that have produced something with the genre-blend present on ’The Shadowed Road’. Sojourner have found their niche, and I look forward to witnessing them develop it.

Standout Songs: The Shadowed Road, Where Lost Hope Lies