Review Summary: Grocery store riffs - still heavy.
The Ashen Abhorrence is a generic black metal album. The unsurprisingly lengthy songs feature solid, stable riffs and a gut punching shrieker, but regrettably, originality is not the band’s strong suit. The riffs are completely cookie cutter, in other words, they’ve been used before. The Ashen Abhorrence offers garden variety riffs, but thankfully they are varied enough to make for decently engaging song structures; they’re not bad riffs per say, just not a special spectacle. The wow factor comes from the extra synth ambience, which gives the illusion that songs are bigger than they are - it’s a cheap trick. At times, due to their ambience, they reminded me of Wintersun. This is the part where I would detail positives, but there aren’t enough interesting details in the album to garner much special praise. It’s certainly an aggressive album (especially thanks to those hair raising shrieks), with a fittingly bleak atmosphere, and riffs still fit the bill. When all is said and done, I enjoyed the album quite a bit, and that’s what counts.
