black metal
Unterm Totenbanner is an album released on December 18, by German atmospheric black metal act Gjaldur. Forty-five minutes long, the record has seven tracks: Szepter der Nacht, Das Mysterium, Mondnacht, Unterm Totenbanner, Dämmerlicht, Uralten and Nachtalb. With a lucid, but sinister atmosphere, and an incisively consistent, but flexible musical structure, the style of the group is a nefarious, but existential descent into an everlasting abyss of emptiness and desperation. With dispersive and lugubrious melodies, that pushes the listener into a vigorous experience of distinct subversion of reality, the sound of Gjaldur is profoundly submerged in an infinite, catatonic and dilated vagueness, where the sound expands dynamically into an increasingly proficient and surreal periphery of depressive and cautious lethargy, where everything that you feel is designed to project a different pattern of sensibilities.
With abrasive and penetrating guitar lines, the general musical layout on Unterm Totenbanner is intrinsically calm and patient. The sound strikingly corrodes the walls of the melodies, while concomitantly conceives the density of its graceful and lucid elegance. While there is sometimes almost a lack of aggressiveness, this album is abundant on poetic splendor and perceptive artistry, engraving into a permanently effective ghostly demise all the nefarious dissident dissonances that is deliberately disseminated throughout the harmonious element’s dispersive urgencies, giving to the sound a sense of immaculate despair, that is marvelously sculpted at the crest of the sound’s inherent nature.
As a consolidated conjuncture of splendid symphonies that rely on stable, but sharply pungent harmonies, the songs on this album are a volatile conception of sensibilities, created from the more ethereal elements of the genre; as the melodies keep floating in a gracious atmosphere of agonizing opalescence, the sound is beautifully consecrated to the extraordinary grievances of its own technical and sensible musical splendor.
A beautiful, thoroughly original work that departs from the obscure creative abysses of its own rudimentary sadness, Unterm Totenbanner is a sophisticated and amazingly genuine state of the art work, that deliberates a magnificent musical style over its own aggrandizing perception of artistry. A deeply sensational, vigorous, sinister and funereal masterpiece, this album gives a new perspective to black metal, and opens a realm of possibilities and creative authenticities, that certainly categorizes Gjaldur as one of the most creative and formidable acts of the genre, in the contemporary underground scene.
Wagner
With abrasive and penetrating guitar lines, the general musical layout on Unterm Totenbanner is intrinsically calm and patient. The sound strikingly corrodes the walls of the melodies, while concomitantly conceives the density of its graceful and lucid elegance. While there is sometimes almost a lack of aggressiveness, this album is abundant on poetic splendor and perceptive artistry, engraving into a permanently effective ghostly demise all the nefarious dissident dissonances that is deliberately disseminated throughout the harmonious element’s dispersive urgencies, giving to the sound a sense of immaculate despair, that is marvelously sculpted at the crest of the sound’s inherent nature.
As a consolidated conjuncture of splendid symphonies that rely on stable, but sharply pungent harmonies, the songs on this album are a volatile conception of sensibilities, created from the more ethereal elements of the genre; as the melodies keep floating in a gracious atmosphere of agonizing opalescence, the sound is beautifully consecrated to the extraordinary grievances of its own technical and sensible musical splendor.
A beautiful, thoroughly original work that departs from the obscure creative abysses of its own rudimentary sadness, Unterm Totenbanner is a sophisticated and amazingly genuine state of the art work, that deliberates a magnificent musical style over its own aggrandizing perception of artistry. A deeply sensational, vigorous, sinister and funereal masterpiece, this album gives a new perspective to black metal, and opens a realm of possibilities and creative authenticities, that certainly categorizes Gjaldur as one of the most creative and formidable acts of the genre, in the contemporary underground scene.
Wagner
