Review Summary: Darkestrah's beginnings, in yellow, green and red
It's time to look at one of my favorite bands' early days. This is an opportunity to review Darkestrah's first album, but also to do something I really enjoy but haven’t really gotten the time to do in previous reviews: explain the band’s lore in depth.
Some context here: “Sary Oy” is the debut album by Darkestrah, consisting of 3 very long songs which are basically re-workings of their demo tracks. Those songs are called “Sary Oy”, “Jashil Oy” and “Kyzil Oy”, referring to three nature goddesses from Kyrgyz mythology. The first parts of their names respectively mean yellow, green and red. “Kara Oy” (black), on “The Great Silk Road”, is a sort of sequel to those songs.
As for the music, I’d say it’s not quite as mature or masterful as their next albums would be, it’s not exactly my favorite Darkestrah album… but listening to it is still a unique experience, and it accomplished what a debut album should do: introduce us to a band with great potential and a unique identity. From the first notes of the title track, you feel immersed into something very special, with its wind howling, simple but oddly gripping acoustic guitar and flute melodies, until the electric guitars come in, clearly building up to something. That something is an explosion of guitars, with that kind of black metal riffs that sound like a howling wind, which I guess is an appropriate comparison. The song keeps going at a rather steady rhythm, as if telling a story, then it gets faster as the story becomes more epic and grandiose, before reaching a sort of climax with heavy guitars and drums. Darkestrah’s talent for heavy but incredibly catchy riffs, that feel like black metal but not completely, is already apparent.
The first song is, in some versions of the album, the only one with lyrics. The lyrics here tell a mythological tale, so the vocalist is like a bard reciting an ancient text, but in harsh black metal vocals. Well, as we notice here, Kriegtalith’s vocals were never typical black metal shrieks, more like a very raspy, whispery growl. They sound incredibly muffled and hard to understand, which they wouldn’t be on next albums, in part due to better recordings. To use a super-obvious description, which doesn’t do this band justice, her voice is an acquired taste, but she’s still my favorite of all Darkestrah vocalists.
Anyway, there’s more instrumentation than vocals, so let’s talk more about that. “Jashil Oy” is where the album gets a little weird and might lose some of you. It starts as a soft, quiet instrumental, that repeats the same melody and occasionally explodes into a much faster riff, almost thrash-influenced, that also repeats the same little melody. Like most of this album, it’s hard to describe, hard to explain what it does to your brain. But the faster riff will never leave your head, because it’s the biggest earworm Darkestrah have ever written. Probably one of their most memorable riffs as well.
As you can guess, it’s not really a pure black/folk metal album, it also has a strong progressive, experimental, psychedelic influence, or at least, a tendency to play around with instruments for very long to see what sticks. That becomes even more obvious in “Kyzil Oy”, which is 25 minutes of what I like to call black/folk metal with keyboards experimentations. It’s the most influenced by Kyrgyz folk music, the most complex and heaviest. It has the same riff and melody as “Kara Oy”, but with something else: the keyboard playing. The keyboards are played by Anastasia, the band’s only other female member. She’d leave the band after this album, but I won’t forget her amazing skills and her trippy, atmospheric keyboard melodies. Again, if you find the patience to listen to a long song, if you don’t mind the keyboards that some have described as “something out of a horror movie soundtrack”, it’s a really good song. Or maybe I just like it because it’s named after my favorite color.
By the way, did I mention that every song here ends with the same riff, like an ending theme for a series? Yes, like I said, it’s a very strange album. I’m not sure who to recommend it to, and I’m not even sure I love it or just like it. Mostly, I like seeing how Darkestrah began, and how they would change or develop their sound later. I have to say that they would sharpen their songwriting chops on their next albums, but I like how they introduced their unique sound, and how they proved their ability to play almost every musical genre they could think of. I like going back to this album, when I want something trippy and peculiar that sounds like nothing else I’ve ever heard.
