Olhava - Frozen Bloom

Once upon a time, on the shores of Lake Lagoda, outside Saint Petersburg, there were three friends. These three friends played instrumental post-black metal. They played it well. They sort of invented a genre - where French blackgaze and instrumental post-metal met, and created a celestial cacophony. They called themselves Trna.

Across three albums they created some very serious and ethereal post-metal (which I should probably talk about here at some point). But, somewhere along the way two of the three decided to explore less salubrious topics, and formed a side project for this more morose, depressing music.

That side project is Olhava. This is their second album. It is magnificent. I'm not going to try to sell you on it. Just listen.

With a cameo fom Austin Lunn of Panopticon on track 3, this is quite the album.

Multi-instrumentalist Andrey Novozhilov and drummer Timur Yusupov describe their new journey with words of thoughtful contemplation: “When winter is just starting to fade and give some space to the first steps of spring… When life starts to reappear and the very early flowers peek through the thawing soil, a sudden drop of the temperature can leave them petrified and frozen back again, punished by the “Queen of Fields”. This statuesque dead beauty, being infinitely alive and dead at the same time is the main metaphor of this album. Frozen Bloom is about unfulfilled dreams. About how we sacrifice everything today for some abstract “tomorrow”, which may never come. But tomorrow and yesterday don’t exist – only this very moment of static contemplation is real”.

Comments

Agriculture - Agriculture

a While calling themselves ''ecstatic" black metal, Agriculture traipses along the line between atmo-black and blackgaze pretty adroitly. I am not as head over heels as some of the metal press I have been reading about them (like Rolling Stone for instance), but I think they have a good thing going here. They remind me of Vattnet Viskar sort of, and I am going to withhold judgement until I can see them live to really decide. That said, this is an album that has been in heavy rotation at my house since its release. Agriculture by Agriculture

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

This album answers an incredibly important question: What if Rick Deckard was a goth? A goth replicant that could pass the Voight-Kampff test easily. More importantly, it provides a stunning backdrop to the writing I am supposed to be doing, but keep avoiding. French composer James Kent has always been something of a polarizing figure. Much of his earlier work has been very HOTLINE MIAMI style synthwave. This is most definitely NOT THAT. Instead you a weird robot sex soundtrack - a post-punk mood piece cloaked in goth rock nihilism and sexual malevolence. Gritty, misanthropic, but still atmospheric and ambient, this is some nice stuff! Lustful Sacraments by PERTURBATOR

Dødsferd - Skotos

Raw atmospheric black metal it it's sun soaked Mediterranean best. Wait... That's not right. Oh, but it is. For 20 years, Greece has been the home of Dødsferd since it's beginning as a one-man side project. Now, 10 albums, as many splits and EPs, and five comps, two new songs are available. Packaged with a re-release of the landmark album 'Diseased Remnants of a Dying World', what you have here is the pinnacle of what raw atmo-black can be. A full LP of this would easily be Album of the Year. I can still hope right? Skotos (Atmospheric Black Metal) by DØDSFERD (Greece)

Trumpet of Amdusias

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