What's this? Another atmospheric/ambient black metal album for 2015? Yes, indeed it is. For somebody who has a few quibbles with this particular subgenre, I certainly do find myself listening to a good bit of it. My frustration with this genre mostly has to do with the fact that when you're hanging out this high on the metal tree, the metal roots are almost invisible. Many releases of this genre just come across as post-rock with blast beats and harsh vocals, and much of the raw edge that makes black metal what it is, is conspicuously absent. That said, I do still enjoy the overall sound, regardless of its distance from its supposed musical forebears.

This album is the second effort released by Vials of Wrath and is stylistically speaking quite similar to the first album. The album is littered with clean acoustic passages, and even in some of the heavier sections, you'll hear a clean acoustic guitar accompanying the blast beats and distorted tremolo riffs. The album opens with a synth-laden introduction and the synths play heavily into the final mix. In fact, though I wouldn't say that they are the main driving force of the album, they are prominent enough that if you removed them, you would alter the character of the music so much that it would hardly be recognisable as the same composition.

Though I'm not too keen on chunks of synth in my metal soup, I don't mind acoustic passages at all provided they serve a purpose. And in this case they certainly do, and that's above and beyond the normal uses of just intros and outros. They are employed quite successfully for both atmosphere as well as musical suspense. But they can tend to carry on for a bit longer than I would like for them to in places, but even then, they are well crafted enough that the music remains interesting in spite of the lack of a driving percussion section.

The vocals are nothing short of excellent. In fact, probably what makes this album as compelling as it is are the vocals which are of the hollow razor-blade-in-your-throat type. They are a perfect fit for this type of music. But that brings me to my main criticism and that is that the production should have been less crisp in the heavier sections. In my opinion, a more low-fidelity recording would have gone a long way to make those screams of desperation more effective and harrowing. As it is now, the vocals and the rest of the music are slightly incongruous. The pristine production of the instruments doesn't quite pack the same punch and so the end result does suffer a bit, which brings me to my main takeaway from this album: this album is great and enjoyable; the music is pleasant and conducive to reflection, but it didn't grab me by the collar and throw me to the ground and force me to question the fabric of my consciousness the way that I wished it had (indeed, the way I think it could have). Instead, I just felt the existential void tugging at the corners of my soul, begging me to thoughtfully reconsider my existence.

There are a couple of major highlights to the record and the first is the album's centrepiece, “Burning Autumn Leaves (Under a Harvest Moon)”. It begins with a haunting classical tremolo guitar solo and slowly morphs and gains momentum, building up to a scorching guitar solo that is composed from equal parts of shredding metal and David Gilmour. If you want to get a glimpse of this album's sound, this track is a great place to start. The second is the closing track, which is pretty much flawless. In fact, I would say that this track is about the closest you can get to that vacuum of depressive black awareness without getting completely sucked in.

So despite my criticisms, this is still a great album, and it certainly falls amongst my most listened to albums of the year. Fans of depressive black metal or ambient black metal should definitely give this a shot.

Originally written for fetiddead.wordpress.com.