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Band: Enmarta
Album title: Sea Of Black
Release date: 30 June 2015
Label: Cryo Chamber
Sea Of Black is the debut album for Enmarta and is a result of Siegfrid's four years long work, it's an exceptional dark ambient release and not only, once those elongated melacholic soundscapes start to penetrate your mind the whole new imagery of cinematic music opens up. Sea Of Black is a multifaceted album, it is composed with many layers of different elements that are well combined together into a flowing mass of sound based on dark ambient foundation, and Siegfrid's training and service in classical music leaves a deep mark on Enmarta's sound with. The fluent soundsapes are cohesively painting pictures of isolated castles and dark towers, but still the whole album is in contrast to some of the latest post-apocalyptic dark ambient releases as it offers a bit more gothic and sentimental toned sound. The melancholic and in a way depressive feeling of isolation is present all over, yet in this starkly cinematic atmosphere there are many parts where some soft and almost tender passages bring a bit of brightness and serve with gentle caresses. Enmarta's Sea Of Black enthuses with its diversity, bold insertions, well composed soundscapes, interesting ideas and most of all with its fluent deeply melancholic cinematic vibe. It offers a well flowing sonic journey that every fan of dark ambient should perceive.
Read a full review HERE
Band: Arcturus
Album title: Arcturian
Release date: 8th May 2015
Label: Prophecy Productions
With the underlying black metal roots, Arcturian delivers such a grand surprise by simply overblowing all the inserted stylistic elements to a point, when you may feel all will explode. But it does not. Not only rich orchestrations, use of various string instruments and piano melodies found their way to fit perfectly into the picture, Arcturus went modern old school, and even added a fair amount of dubstep. The peculiar inclusion of electronica is not in any way abusive of the sound, but it rather gives it a hypnotizing and mysterious note and deepens the profound atmosphere of it. With razor-sharp guitar arrangements, blasting drumming and ICS Vortex's dramatic vocal work, Arcturian is just what we love about this band: bizarre, deranged and schizophrenic, even diabolical and wildly obscure at moments. With so many various elements being intensified to its maximum point, Arcturian is all in all a straight-forward, extremely cohesive and swirling work of art. Its core may be askew, but its atmosphere stretches from ghastly to romantic, from stygian to lucent and is from the first to the last note deeply vigorous.
Read a full review HERE
Band: Neurotech
Album title: Stigma
Release date: 7 June 2015
Label: Self-Released
Playing softly with intertwining so many various styles, building on a solid foundation of cyber metal and enhancing with so many different layers, most notable feature of Stigma is its strong cinematic approach. The blasting drums are still present, covered with a dense layer of electronic effects and Wulf's vocoded vocals. But what really makes it so significant and pushes it further, is the grandeur approach and stupendous orchestrations, which flow more in the vein of film score music of Hans Zimmer, than symphonic metal, and are vibrating throughout the entire album. However, what spices up the deal are the numerous, eloquent insertions of so many different stylistic elements into the game. Stigma is yet another album, Wulf can only feel pride and joy of. What from a certain point of view may seem like it's only Infra Versus Ultra part 2, when realizing its potent nature, this album does open up new dimensions in the realms of Neuortech. On one side it is so staggeringly poetic, romantic and thought-provoking, on the other well as nerve striking, energetic and even demonic. If you are one of those Neurotech fans, who still craves and wishes for an Antagonist sequel, leave your hopes behind. But if you are here to follow the further evolution of its music, Stigma is simply an album you must embrace.
Read a full review HERE
Band: Cradle Of Filth
Album title: Hammer Of The Witches
Release date: 10 July 2015
Label: Nuclear Blast Records
Cradle Of Filth promised to go back to their roots with this opus and they were not kidding, ok, not entirely, but that scarry gothy feeling throughout the songs is back again. In a way that's the crucial point in Hammer Of The Witches which still mantains the technical factor heard on the previous album, The Manticore & Other Horrors, on a high level, but like it or not the song structures are much more flowing and ambiance is gloomier than on a couple of previous albums. The pace of the album is for most of the time very fast and explosive, with numerous thrash metal elements, combined with typical heavy metal tradition, blasphemous blackened lines, symphonic insertions and a couple of gothic metal structures, all well balanced together into one hellish dark entity. The sound of Hammer Of The Witches is energetic, rich, dense, very dynamic, groovy and most of all it's intense. The band continues with its tradition of infusing each album with conceptual elements that embolden the songs' dramatic execution, the album's title gleefully flips the historical script, turning the tables on the gruesome witch hunts of 16th and 17th century Europe and exacting some hard-earned vengeance on behalf of all of those who suffered persecution at the hands of religious zealots during that turbulent period in history. The hammer is coming down, hard, and revenge will be sweet indeed.
Read a full review HERE
Band: Ison
Album title: Cosmic Drone [EP]
Release date: 8 June 2015
Label: Self-Released
It was expected in a way that nothing else but a pure sonic beauty can came out from the two likeminded artists, Heike Langhans, known from her solo project Lorelei and as the new vocalist of the Swedish gothic/doom metal masters Draconian, and Daniel Änghede who's the main force behind electro/shoegaze/goth duo Hearts Of Black Science and member of Crippled Black Phoenix. The music of Ison is mainly inspired by drone, goth, ambient, post-rock and shoegaze, but with Heike's deep fascination towards astral planes and universe everything gains a completely new dimension. Everything flows with such ease, yet has the power to hypnotize with its dark charm and eerie atmosphere. Great compositional skills by both artists shine with a mesmerizing combination of guitars, synths and electronica where every single guitar chord, let it be acoustic or heavily distorted, every echoing pulse, cold spherical piano touch and every single beat, with all those perfectly arranged spacey synths and beautifully balanced almost ethereal vocals, all of those and yet all other elements which are only waiting to penetrate your mind are in pitch perfect symbiosis to force the listener to close eyes and submit to the world without cellphone reception or windows to tell if it´s day or night, to the location of total isolation to the outside world.
Read a full review HERE
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