Review Summary: I died tonight, but rebirth is on its way.
There’s that special something about genre-bending that just always gets to me. The ability to take two or more genres and fuse them together, eventually creating something completely new and unique to you and to that combination you made. It’s quite besotting. Remember that scene from Ratatouille, in which the blue rat eats one fruit, and then the other and both experiences result into some truly impressive emotions, after which he combines both and gets into euphoric state. That’s how genre combinations work. And have we got ourselves a doozie this time.
Atmospheric Post-Metal with a strong Neofolk vibe is just what I and anyone with a smidge of self-respect and crushing underlying sorrow need in their lives. There are no simpler words to describe this than ‘devastating’ and ‘grandiose’. In spite of all the obvious influences and the overwhelming musical arrangement and song-writing, this album never falls into the pit of bloated pretend-depression, whose most prominent representatives tend to overexaggerate their emotions and are unable to put their love of over-the-top crescendos under control. Certainly,
Our Season Draws Near has a lot of that too, but never to a point of drawing away from the natural, unmanufactured beauty of the record.
And this thing is indeed beautiful. It might not strike that way with its tunes and instrumentation, but the magnetic presence underneath it all just makes it all the more powerful. Just take the opener “Our Silver Age”, whose gentle acoustic melancholy hazily misleads you to believe that it will be a tender and caressing experience all throughout. But the contrary is the truth, for this album immediately explodes into an array of soul-shredding, heart-wrenching musical beatdowns and longings.
Its cuts like “Winter of Winds” clearly show all the truthful dejection in the imperfect and gradually more tired of constant disarray vocals. Or the slow-burning, near ritualistic nature of “Solitude (Exterior)”, or the utter emotional breakdown that is “Odessa”, or the freezing solitude behind “Sorgen (Sunwheels)”, all the way to the maniacal perils of “By Porchlight”, which might also be (strangely enough) the album’s catchiest and most extravagant cut. The album triumphantly culminates in the longest, but also the most sophisticated track of them all, “Our Ice Age”, as if to symbolise that the emotional vultures sky scouring above all throughout the album have finally abandoned you too, but with that comes peace of mind, as you are no longer troubled by the world’s dismay. So turn the volume up, close your eyes and let the far from kind approach of this beast dishevel you.
