Review Summary: Lack-Lustre
Lustre from the beautiful country of Sweden unleashes their 8th full length studio album combining their signature style of ambient black metal to a very dismayed and bored listener. Being a big fan of both ambient music and black metal, I found myself becoming impatient when constantly bombarded with the same slow, droning tempo of uninspired sounding music. The four songs on this thirty-three-minute record might as well have melded into one single track because there’s nary a difference between the four tracks aside for a slightly nuanced shift in the plucked lead melody.
Each track begins with the quietly plucked instrumental melody which then explodes into a heavy distorted guitar strum that occurs on every first beat of the 4/4 count. This will continue for a few minutes and the distorted guitars will vanish for a bit with only the lead melody remaining and if you’re lucky, it switches up just a tiny bit. The guitars eventually come roaring back for the final leg of the track with maybe a light orchestral or string arrangement to accompany it and that’s it; eight minutes have gone by and there hasn’t been a drum pattern switch or tempo fluctuation or even a varied guitar riff…just eight minutes of repetition of something utterly uninteresting.
That being said, the production and mix of this record are flawless and it sounds entirely incredible from the drum tone to the mix between the deep guitar strums and the leadwork. There are occasional moments of black metal screaming that cascade the back of the mix creating an eerie, shocking and unhinged soundscape. This occurs seldomly and while it does add flair when present, it’s sparseness offers very little to improve the dynamics of the song. Often with ambient music, each track will possess a certain identity that distinguishes it from the other while remaining fairly stagnant in order to really delve into the sounds created but these four cuts are nearly identical. Maybe this simply wasn’t what I was expecting when looking at the gorgeous album artwork, but I wasn’t impressed. I hope that others will find something enjoyable to latch on to when listening through this.
