With four tracks – As the Earth Becomes My Shroud, Devoid of All Feeling, Lost in Claustrophobic Thought and The Feeble Sickness and Depressive Rot – what we have here is an impressively calm, cold and deeply resilient exemplar of melodic black metal.
With the predominance of slow harmonies, exceedingly sculpted and detailed in a coherent panel of afflictive desolation and solitude, Ancient tundra go to very specific lengths to endure, foretell and express the ambient coldness of its native place, showcasing an anxious, agonizing and depressive fate on the music, that only a great artist could engrave on the sound.
The freezing paleness and the expressive lacerations impressed onto the sound transport you to a distant place, where you feel amazed and dilacerated at the same time, as your senses are driven to a palace where an imperial solitude slowly drags your soul to a protuberant void, and nothing can really change your perceptions about the profoundness of the dreams, that slowly dominates your mind. A work that little by little ignites a conflagration of demands deep inside your sensibilities, Lost in Claustrophobic Thought is a very lucid and unreal work. Very calmly, deeply dissolves your feelings, to make you see the world around you differently.
A more spirited, kind and gentle form of black metal – although with a very intense and disturbing appeal – devoid of any higher insinuations, this work will open your sensibilities to a different comprehension of the genre. Here standardized in a more monochromatic revelation of dissolving slowness, your soul is unbelievably stolen from the path of normality where it usually lies, to face the universe in a colder and direct form.
A very ambitious, but organically well produced melodic black metal album, Lost in Claustrophobic Thought deeply rearranges and reorganizes the basic principles of the genre onto something different, more elusive, more sensible, more fantastic, more transparent, credible and agonizing. Suffocating your soul, but liberating it at the same time, while delivers the methodical rules of a deeply transient sound, Ancient Tundra creates and exonerates a very peculiar and personal overview of the genre, that can never be properly understood or assimilated. Nevertheless, it is an intriguing and profoundly interesting work, that sees, comprehends and delivers black metal in an impressively singular atmosphere of thought, concept and philosophy of sound.
Wagner