Review Summary: No; these aren't the b-sides from 'Two Hunters.' Yes; you should still be interested.
Ardour Loom is a black metal band from Oregon. They play an atmospheric, post-rock and ambient-filled style of black metal--not unlike many of the “Cascadian” bands from the surrounding areas. The fact that Ardour Loom are yet another band clearly influenced by Wolves in the Throne Room and their ilk raises an interesting question: how long will it be until ripping off Wolves’ classic
Two Hunters album becomes unacceptable in American black metal? From the looks (or rather, the sounds) of Ardour Loom’s first untitled demo release, the current answer to that question is still “Not quite yet."
Featuring two twenty-minute tracks full of meandering post-rock and fast, melodic black metal, Ardour Loom’s debut release is a prime example of a band effectively ripping off a classic album whilst still appearing original and interesting. While this demo release may not tread much new ground through its forty-minute runtime, it attempts to organize its content so as to appear not completely similar to its contemporaries and actually makes itself fairly interesting in the process, while still wearing its influences proudly on its sleeves.
Initiates of Formless introduces the listener with a slow, drum-driven passage (highly reminiscent of WitTR’s
Cleansing) before beginning to flirt with the band’s harsher side, briefly indulging in quick blast-driven riffs before curling back into spacey melodicism. After that, it’s your typical back-and-forth post-black metal affair for the remaining fifteen minutes of the track, switching through melodic post-rock build-ups, mid-paced atmospheric black metal, and blast-driven, ‘epic’ crescendos. The second track,
Ascend the Crimson Confluence, sees the band continue this basic build-up/crescendo/rebuild structure until its very end, driving the listener through a roller coaster of numerous crescents and valleys before leveling out in a slow outro.
While its individual ideas might not be totally original in themselves, the ways this demo’s pieces are stitched together create a fairly enjoyable and interesting listen, despite the fact that most seasoned black metal fans will realize that they've heard most of these ideas before. Ardour Loom’s debut isn’t about doing things originally so much as it is doing them
interestingly and
effectively--for which they definitely succeed. While clearly not reinventing the wheel--or even really turning it at all, for that matter--Ardour Loom show that not all ideas need to be torn apart, extensively scrutinized, and rebuilt in order to remain interesting; sometimes simply reorganizing the pieces you started with can yield results just as interesting as those birthed in complete isolation.
