Review Summary: While boasting some notable names, Sanguine Eagle can't quite decide which route to take on "Storm Mysticism".
Featuring Yellow Eyes’ own Will Skarstad on guitar, rather obscure black metal band Sanguine Eagle popped onto the radar in 2019 when they released two full-length albums via Profound Lore Records on the same day;
Storm Mysticism and
Shores of Avarice. Both featured raw, noisy black metal with penchants for droning and ambience--fairly standard styles for the genre. While both were marketed as complete packages, though, this first record more feels like a five-track hodgepodge of recordings rather than one unified artistic statement structurally, stylistically, and sonically.
To start: the album has two different intro-esque tracks, as if the band couldn’t decide with which to start: the synth-led ambient “Tormento De La Nieve” (which boasts a melody hauntingly similar to that of the “Terminator” film’s theme); and the minimalist acoustic piece “Siete Rayos” (which itself sounds like it came straight from a Fauna album). While neither of these pieces are bad in themselves, they are so stylistically different from the following black metal pieces--and each other--that their conjunctive inclusion seems a bit silly when together they soak up over nine minutes of runtime and almost one fourth of the total album. For the sake of stylistic consistency one or the other really should’ve been removed.
To follow: the “meat” of
Storm Mysticism is definitely its middle two 13+ minute black metal epics, but even they seem awkward next to each other despite their general stylistic consistency. While “Bride of the Blizzard” is noisy, droning, and uses its twin guitars to be steadily melodic, it has an organic feel despite its lo-fi recording quality. Conversely, “Twin Flame” thunders along with a uniquely muffled quality to it that makes it feel like a stolen Rhinocervs track--possibly due to being from a different recording session. While this doesn’t reflect on the quality of either piece--and they are fairly decent hypnotic black metal pieces in themselves--it does reflect poorly on the album as an artistic package, and takes the listener out of the music a little bit. After these two tracks run through their twenty-nine minutes of droning black metal the album closes on another synth-led ambient outro that is (surprise!) also stylistically different from its two opening tracks.
To conclude:
Storm Mysticism is an odd album to take as a “real” full-length as opposed to a longer demo or compilation; its five tracks seem to in one way or another exist separately from each other and don’t work together to create a unified artistic package on really
any levels. While not a bad album,
Storm Mysticism definitely showcases a band not quite sure how or committed to congealing their ambitions into something more consistent and satisfying.
