Moloch - Meine Ganze Hoffnung Stirbt

Moloch (Ukr) - Meine Ganze Hoffnung Stirbt

2011 / Dark Ambient, Piano Music

Moloch is another band I recently came across while exploring the vast world of Internet. I just couldn’t resist checking them out after seeing that artwork in their logo. (I mean just look at it.) 

But how about the album, is it any good? To summarize, yes it is! Actually to be honest, before listening to this album I wouldn’t have thought that an album mainly focused on ambient could strike me as this engaging, but it’s good that there are still some surprises left in the field of music. 

So basically every song on the album consists solely of ambient playing in the background and some piano parts played over it. The two components merge together quite nicely and as a result we get a pretty intense and sad atmosphere which resembles closely that of atmospheric black metal. Technically it’s quite simple, but it works surprisingly well as there still seems to be so much going on with the melodies, and the songs don’t end up dwelling too long in one place. 

The songs themselves are also not that long and they link together almost seamlessly so the album starts almost feeling like a single thirty minutes long track that keeps evolving after every couple of minutes. Personally I like this was of approach a lot and it seems to work really well with the album. 

I was pretty much amazed by the overall quality of the album and it kind of left me aching for more, so I am quite confident that I’ll be listening to some more Moloch in the near future.

Black Funeral - Vukolak

Black Funeral - Vukolak

2010 / Black metal

This weekend I decided to continue my journey to check out Black Funeral and gave Vukolak, the latest full-length release of the band, a couple of spins. It appears that Vukolak is a pretty tough nut to crack and even after listening to the album multiple times, I am still hesitant to say anything about it. I mean it’s pretty clear that it’s one of band’s weaker albums (or at least from those that I have listened to), but with each new spin the album seemed at least a bit more enjoyable. 

The sound is about the same I have come to expect from the band; it’s essentially raw black metal, but what’s new on this album is the introduction of a chaotic aspect to the songwriting, which unfortunately works only half of the time and is ‘utilized’ almost excessively throughout the album. The song quality also seems quite inconsistent and the tracks don’t align as nicely as on the band’s previous albums. What surprised me positively are the couple instrumental/ambient tracks amid all the black metal stuff, which help in creating the obscure atmosphere for the album. 

I think there are multiple strong tracks on the album but the whole set could be way more balanced and engaging, but at the same time I am not convinced that I have yet understood the album fully, so I’ll most likely have to spin it a couple more times before I can make my mind about it.

Black Funeral - Az-i-Dahak

Black Funeral - Az-i-Dahak

2004 / Black Metal

I have had this on/off relation to Black Funeral for multiple years where I keep coming back to them but the urge to listen their stuff fades away relatively quickly. In general I have considered their music worth listening to but somehow I often forget about them until something reminds me of their existence again. However, recently I decided to check them out more thoroughly and for that purpose I just acquired a copy of Az-i-Dahak, and so here are my first thoughts on it.

So Black Funeral has a long history in making vampirism themed black metal/dark ambient and Az-i-Dahak is listed as the midpoint of the band’s discography. On the first spin I take note that that the sound is not as raw as on some of the band’s other albums and apparently the ambient elements are not as strongly present either. (Or then I remember it all wrong because I haven’t listened to their stuff in ages, but anyway..) So what are we actually left with?

To summarize, Az-i-Dahak is a thirty minutes long set of shorter monotonic black metal tracks. Now to be honest, I have thing for this kind of black metal if it’s done correctly, and in my mind this album manages it really well. 

The album goes for a semi-raw soundscape so the sound is rather unpolished, gritty and partly kind of flat, but that’s all part of the magic of this album for me at least. The atmosphere is kept consistent and it is aggressive as well as cold. I think that not a single bad track managed to make its way into the album and there is just enough variation between them to make the whole thing a short but engaging experience. At the time of finishing this text I have already went through the whole thing like four times so I guess it’s safe for me to say that I like it. I think that anyone interested in raw or monotonic black metal could find this worth a spin or two.

Acrimonious - Sunyata

Acrimonious - Sunyata

2012 / Black metal

Sunyata is actually a pretty decent album but it’s just rather uninspiring. The sound on the album resembles that of Nightbringer quite a lot and in fact two of the members used to be a part of the live lineup of NB so it’s pretty clear that NB was the major inspiration for this album. Normally this wouldn’t be such a bad thing if there was also something new to be found, but in this case there was basically nothing that would differentiate this album from an average album of NB.

I do believe that adopting some elements from NB and giving it a twist could result in something great, but unfortunately that is not what Sunyata was really aiming to do. I do like the general style of NB so I simply can’t say that I dislike Sunyata, but I was still mildly disappointed with the lack of originality. I’ll definitely listen to it again at some point and see if I could get more out of it, but now it just felt like a simplified version of NB.