
With great, effusive and vividly colorful guitar lines, afflictive, acute and sordid grasping vocals, prodigious harmonies and marvelously sculpted melodies – all standardized by a significantly high and impeccable production – the efficiency, the general format and the sonorous waves produced by Hoth’s music is sincerely beyond any ordinary measurements. With gloriously captivating, dense, fluctuating and effective guitar solos, a dynamic and ascendant atmosphere, a volatile placidity that moves beyond sensational rhythmic frontiers defying genre conventions and sensibilities, the sagacity and the originality present on Astral Necromancy is an elegant and mordacious surprise. Certainly, this is one of the most marvelous and graceful black metal albums ever created!
I think there is nothing negative to be described about this work. A splendid masterpiece, that aligns a fragrant, honest and spontaneous level of creativity with the true desolate and lugubrious spirit of the genre. You feel at home, spiritually relaxed, literally, listening to this elegant, profoundly authentic and unexpected masterpiece. While virtually all the old elements of traditional black metal are there, making you feel gratefully peaceful with the warmly familiar atmosphere of the music, at the same time, there is so much innovation – that never disrupts nor alienates the hazardous structural anatomy inherent to the genre – that the genuine audacity and the effective creativity of Hoth, besides all merits, deserves to be appreciated and deeply contemplated for its entire run, and this becomes such a great pleasure, you wish the album never ends. Although the entire record is amazingly excellent, I think the ninth track, Journey into the Eternal Winter, deserves to be highlighted as one of the best.
Firmly developing and introducing components of symphonic, melodic and avant-garde metal in a purely black metal context, the effectively experimental combination of diverse elements present in the album is exceedingly successful, and is quite surprising the way they work wonderfully well together. With resonating melodies that can be quite ferocious and aggressive, but concomitantly deeply philosophical, poetic and serene, Hoth presents to its audience on Astral Necromancy a purely genuine, sensible and splendorous level of talent, that seems to be absent from the genre from quite some time. Undoubtedly, this album has all the necessary qualities to be considered a fundamental milestone in the underground scene, for the years to come.
Wagner