Review Summary: The band's best
Moloch is some kind of a legendary band now, ubiquitous in the DSBM/Dark Ambient circle. And for good reason, apart from releasing multitudes of albums, like the Agathocles of Black Metal, the band has truly made a mark. I’ve heard numerous albums of this Ukrainian band but none of them impressed me as much as this one – this is excellent. The main reason being, the band switched too inconsistently between Black Metal and Dark Ambient, while both do go hand-in-hand, there’s something called momentum which is hampered. There needs to be some consistency which I felt the band lacked in its earlier material, but this relatively new album makes sure it makes for quite an experience.
Primarily this is a Black Metal album, with its foundation in the Depressive Suicidal Black Metal theme. It needed to be clear, lest it be interpreted as a Dark Ambient one, which this one clearly is not. Yes, there’s a 15-minute album closer in that vein, but that’s fine. As long as the music retains its essence and reaches out to different realms, it’s fine. Coming back to the Black Metal music, this is beautiful in all its madness. There’s hysteria, uncontrollable madness, but nothing jarring like Silencer. There’s clearly a layer of melancholy, a tearing one, one of despair and anguish, given life to by the incoherent vocalist, wailing in an unknown language. There’s a colour to this madness and it’s got a lot of grey, in a good way. It’s not fully predictable, there’s a lot in between, which makes this album really.
This is a rare commingling of atmosphere and extremity, raw Black Metal riffing synchronizing with Dark Ambient sequencing. It’s as the album cover depicts – suicidal tendencies in an environment of loneliness and despair, no one gives a ***. The keyboards have this extremely mournful tone, not a pleasant one like the forest-loving bands, but something reminiscent of the soundtrack of say the movie The Grey. It’s going on in life, carrying the burden, almost succumbing, wishing to, but can’t. In between all that, emerges haphazard riffing albeit beautifully structured in the context, making an appearance at the right time. It’s something traditionalists will hate, art fans will love.
The band is simply doing it right – the atmosphere is vivid, the images inescapable, the loneliness palpable. It’s DSBM with atmosphere, beautiful yet depressing at the same time. It’s melodies and atmosphere with moments of freaking out. It’s the story of a man walking on the edge. And you are there to relate to every unhinged moment of it. Hope is ever present in its music, despair following it at every step. This is art, this is what we live for. Every once a while comes an album that does it for you. Moloch does it with ‘Der Schein des schwarzesten Schnees’.
