An extremely authorial work, that has powerful guitar lines inserted in the right places, this is almost philosophic black metal, that has on calmness, melancholy, serenity and quietness the right components upon which the artistry of the album is built. Although these elements seems commonplace into the universe of atmospheric black metal, here it is so perfectly dilapidated with a singular precision, that easily overflows the energy of the work abundantly, making you breath, endure, feel, sustain, delegate and disperse into your thoughts, as well as your in body, heart and mind each and every atom of its particles, inserting into the universe of its integrated cosmogony a compelling and complex anatomy of work, that becomes impossible not to be petrified, amused or emotional with such a profoundly poetic and reverberatingly vivid masterpiece. With infuriated, but sincerely desolated vocals, and a pale melodic guitar, that delivers melancholic, but astoundingly meaningful and wonderful rhythms, The Howling Mountains is a very atypical BM album. Way more reflexive, depressive, philosophic, beautiful, energized and sad than most pieces of the category – although in my personal opinion does not qualify as DSBM – this record is an astonishing work of art, that highly improves the genre, in each and every possible aspect.
With a marvelous sonorous skill that resonates throughout the whole album, The Howling Mountains does not have heavy, aggressive or fast passages at all, in all of its splendorous forty seven minutes. Nonetheless, it is astonishing, mortifying and expressively diluted in the way it creates and evokes dark and obscure moments, profoundly sculpting and delivering a spectacular masterpiece, that not only celebrates the longevity of the genre, but reinstates the vitality, the authenticity and the veracity of its principles, in a delicate and almost innocent manner. On the glorious verge of its salutary nature, an ethic and dispersive aesthetic captivates the ears in an almost immediate and hallucinatory manner, admonishing the multifaceted universe of your sensibilities at the virtuous exhilaration of each and every guitar passage.
A little rock’n’roll influenced, the music axis is somewhat simple, but it majorly expresses an antagonistic view towards life. Digresses serenity in chaos, understands the possibility of creating beauty from an aggressive sadness, assimilates lucidity in desolation, and reinstates strength where weaknesses predominate. And penetrates deeply inside your soul, with a vibrating and pungent, but gentle force, evoking the most poetic, dramatic, human and delicate elements of the genre, here worked in the dense prospect of a marvelous universe, never seen, but always hidden within the abysses of the human soul. I throw my own soul at risk here, by saying that this is probably the best album on the genre that I have ever heard in my entire life.
Wagner