Review Summary: Messages from the deep, dark archives.
Austin Lunn is a man of many, many talents. It’s evident in his vastly varied discography and all the different styles and sounds he decides to tinker with on an album-to-album basis. Back in the early days of Panopticon, Austin opted for a straight, to-the-point style of atmospheric black metal, pioneering the late-2000s/early-2010s wave of atmospheric USBM along with bands like Ash Borer, Fell Voices and Twilight.
Songs of Hiraeth is a compilation album made up of 7 tracks originally written between 2009 and 2011 that never saw the light of day and gives you a glimpse into what Panopticon would become all these years later.
In typical Panopticon fashion, these tracks are long, drawn-out and have multiple influences working for them. As of this point, Austin didn’t experiment heavily with the bluegrass and folk influences, but you can hear them creeping up in almost all of these tracks. An acoustic passage here, a banjo playing there and you can piece together that these songs were written right before he went overload on the bluegrass sound on
Kentucky. The atmosphere of old coal mines is very much present here and the organic feeling of the production adds heavily to the atmosphere. Each riff sounds like an axe being taken to a massive tree in the forest where nobody can hear. Every note has room to breathe freely as Austin’s devilish howls reverberate in the background like the Lord calling from above.
The drumming has always been my favorite aspect of Panopticon, and his first few albums especially have my favorite drumming ever in the history of black metal. This release is no different. Austin’s breakneck fills and sublime blasts on the snare never cease to make my jaw hit the floor. Every blast feels like a call to the Gods of the forest. It makes you feel as if the drums are beating to a ritual being performed by an indigenous group of cannibals. Again, the production is so systematically natural that each instrument is just flowing in the wind.
Songs of Hiraeth is the perfect transition from the pummeling and politics-fueled anthems of the self-titled and
Collapse to the folk-filled, honky tonk(ish) tunes of the 3 albums that followed. The subtle hints of bluegrass and americana are felt clearly in the background of most of these tracks. The only thing I will say that could be perceived as negative would be that the black metal parts aren’t blended as well with the folk bits as they are on later releases. It can feel at times like two separate albums, but both styles are done so well that it hardly matters.
Austin has been making his own brand of kick-ass black metal for almost two decades now and he has shown no signs of slowing down. Even after releasing his magnum opus,
The Rime of Memory, he still opted to rework songs that are over 15 years old and put them out as an album of their own.
Songs of Hiraeth brings these archived tracks to full form and gives a look into the reason why Austin decided to add so many influences to his twisted atmospheric black metal base. Panopticon is, simply put, one of the best black metal bands of all-time and Austin just keeps giving us reason after reason as to why that statement is a fact.
