
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