Review Summary: You'd think Hope Drone were Gorgoroth with how intently they've tried to make their songs all sound the same on "Cloak of Ash."
There’s that old saying about most second-wave black metal bands sounding alike, and that idea feels woven into the very fabric of the Hope Drone’s modern brand of post-black metal. Simply put: their instrumental and song structuring styles are both so constricted and simple that despite almost always writing songs up to or past the ten minute mark, rarely do any of them ever sound unique to one another. Even though structurally different, it’s just hard to tell almost any two of them apart. They all feature more-or-less the same instrumental ideas and the same types of riffs (read: tremolo riffs all day, every day), just rearranged slightly differently on each track. There’s rarely a unique riff, gripping melody, or crescendo that’s interesting enough to help differentiate their respective songs from any of the others. In that sense,
Cloak of Ash doesn’t really feel like an album at all, but rather just one big 71-minute hunk of basic black metal and post-rock materials arbitrarily sorted and cut into seven tracks.
But the real shame of Hope Drone’s first full-length isn’t so much how mind-numbingly boring it is as a whole, but rather how badly its individual tracks are represented as part of the record in total: Taken in a vacuum, the 20-minute behemoth opener “Unending Grey” is a fairly well-organized piece that boasts both good mixing and a nice, rawer (more treble-heavy) take on the modern post-rock/black metal style. As do the next three ten-minute pieces. And the following nine-minute pieces. And the six-minute instrumental. But stacked on top of each other they become effectively indistinguishable,
Cloak of Ash feeling more like a giant wash of tremolos, growls, and blast beats than anything anyone really mapped out beforehand. And that’s a shame, because if drastically edited for time (cutting about thirty minutes or three tracks),
Cloak of Ash could’ve been a much more tolerable and interesting release, albeit still a stereotypically unadventurous black metal record. So let’s
Hope their next album doesn’t
Drone on for too long, and they might be able to churn out a winner yet. Ba dum tsh.
