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”.