Review Summary: The first step on a brand new journey.
There’s so much you can do within the black metal genre. Bands have lots of wiggle room to tinker with different sounds, productions, riffs, etc. Innoruuk is a brand new black metal band formed by Sput’s very own Sarah Westervelt earlier this year and it barely took her any time at all to put together her debut album,
Finis Bonorum.
The main inspiration for this album is clearly coming from 90s melodic black metal bands like Dissection and Dimmu Borgir, but also adding a heavily atmospheric spin on things a la the mid-2010s USBM scene. The riffs are piercing and the tremolo picking almost reminds me of early Astronoid in the fact that they give off some fluffy, cloudy reverb making you feel as if you’re floating 10,000 feet in the air. It’s really impressive how the riffs are normally pretty simplified (like a lot of black metal bands of this ilk), but they stick in your head long after the album ends.
Album art can be very important and I feel like the art here really depicts the feelings invoked while listening. It’s almost a fire and ice type of give and take. The black metal bits are extremely melodic and trance-inducing, representing the fire and the light, organic production value represents the light at the end of the tunnel. What I haven’t mentioned yet is the fact that some of these riffs are akin to late 80s doom epics like Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus. It wasn’t intentional, but the plodding nature of some of these riffs are straight-up agonizing and heavily goth-tinged.
The vocal aspect of this album can be hit or miss for listeners, just depending on how you like your black metal vocals. They’re extremely banshee-like and almost sound like nails on a chalk board a la early/mid-90s Dani Filth without a lot of the deep gutturals. They’re almost on the verge of deathcore pig squeals. For me, I could listen to them all day long, but some may find them a tad grating and one-note at times. Not to say they’re bad because they’re not, it would just benefit the album to have a bit more variety next time around.
My only real gripe with the album is that it could’ve been cut just a little bit shorter. This thing clocks in at over an hour, and while it does the job it sets out to do with ease, there are some points that feel like maybe a riff goes on too long or maybe the outro could’ve been trimmed down some. Either way, it’s a minor complaint and doesn’t drag down the album’s quality very much at all.
Finis Bonorum is a really great first step into the black metal realm for Sarah. Her other projects vary from emo and post-hardcore to drum and bass and glitch-type stuff and the jump to black metal was almost out of the blue. That being the case, this album is indeed a huge triumph. With more practice and a bit more variety, Innoruuk could really take things to the next level in the black metal scene, but for now, this will do just fine.
