Review Summary: Little known, but don't let it discourage you, this is a gem
One day many years ago, I was scouring the free new metal releases tab on Bandcamp when I stumbled across this little gem. Let's cut out any pretense here;
Five Suns is one of the best albums that you may have never heard of. It's a shame this never popped off and turned into a project that had more time and investment put in. Shroud Ritual is/was a one-man extreme metal project spearheaded by a guy named Patrick, who recorded every instrumental part and also mixed and mastered everything, and it sounds just as crisp and clean as albums with a far higher budget.
There's no vocals, so all focus is put onto the instrumentation here, much like someone like Ben Sharp, also known as Cloudkicker, has done with his entire discography, or what Night Verses chose to do from From the Gallery of Sleep onward save for a few features. The musicianship is superb, especially when again, you factor in the fact that it is one guy doing all of this. At its core it's a progressive metal album, but rather than going the djent route, Patrick chose to go the route of exploring extreme metal as a whole, namely the more death metal side, while also having some blackened elements and even foraying into folksier soundscapes.
One of the best instances of Patrick's writing on
Five Suns is "Celestial Dome", clocking in at 9 minutes and being the overall best representation of what this has to offer. It features impeccable drumming, brilliantly audible bass, and great guitar work that drives the song along, along with the rest of the album. The acoustic break 3 minutes in shows an almost Opeth-ian side to his writing - a great example of this album's dynamic range. Everything that's said about Celestial Dome can be said about this entire record, speaking to its incredible consistency.
Five Suns makes a great case for one of the strongest obscure little-known albums I have ever heard, only truly being rivaled by Eviscerate Soul by Break My Fucking Sky. Unless you're one of the few thousand people on earth who have streamed this, you've slept on it long enough, feel free to make this the day you stop. You won't regret it.
