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

葬尸湖 (Zuriaake) - 孤雁 (Gu Yan)

The thing I continue to love about this album, now five years after it came out, is how unabashedly Chinese it is. For me, there is nothing quite so nice as taking something from somewhere else and adapting it to your particular circumstance, whether it be food, music, or whatever else. The world is filled with terrible Nordic imitators, so I am always really stoked to see bands who lean in hard to their local scene / culture / roots. This is probably one of the albums that really sent me down that path, and I will always be indebted to Zuriaake for that. Gu Yan is an epic, sprawling, even cinematic, album, and should appeal to fans of bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Primordial . Musically, there are serious elements of Summoning here, but most of this album is utterly unique to Zuriaake and the atmosphere they build is entirely their own. Traditional instruments back up the backbone of the sound, not as a gimmick, but as the bedrock on which the whole edifice rests. ...

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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