Is this thread dead or was the last album just now exciting enough? Let's find out with the next entry by Parama!
Spectral Lore - III
Black metal
Length: 87:30
1. Omphalos (7:28)
2. The Veiled Garden (16:32)
3. The Cold March Towards Eternal Brightness (14:42)
4. Drifting Through Moss and Ancient Stone (11:26)
5. The Spiral Fountain (10:46)
6. A Rider Through the Lands of an Infinite Dreamscape (12:45)
7. Cosmic Significance (13:51)
Warning: growlsYou can check this album out via:
Spotify LinkYouTube LinkIf you don't want to blindly dive into the whole album, check out these songs from the album:
Spectral Lore - OmphalosSpectral Lore - Cosmic Significance
Parama: so this isn't going to go over well with half the people who follow this thread but I really don't care. This album is massive, it's diverse, the production kinda sucks a little bit, but honestly all of that doesn't matter with how straight up good and creative the music on display here is.
The opener, Omphalas, can be a little offputtng as it's just as raw as black metal gets, but after that the album tones it down a notch for the sludgy The Veiled Garden, and then the more melodic The Cold March. Finishing off disc one with the folk track Drifting Through Moss. If it isn't clear by now, every single track on this album serves as its own entity, its own take on a different style of black metal, while still being unified by a similar writing style and melodic phrasing as well as general sound. That construction alone turns a near 90-minute album into a surprisingly easy and consistently compelling listen.
Disc 2 is a bit shorter than disc 1, starting off with a relatively mellow black metal track in The Spiral Fountain, followed up by the especially progressive A Rider in the Lands, and closing off with the half-ambient synth half-instrumental metal Cosmic Significance. Again each track is a pretty unique entity on the album and again each track just kills it. The last two tracks may well be my favorites on the entire album but there isn't a single bad track here and only one or two tracks not -quite- as good as everything else here.
This is well and truly a black metal masterpiece and while, yes, it will absolutely require some time and patience, it's absolutely worth if if you have any interest in black metal whatsoever. So... waiting for like two people in the thread to listen to it and nobody else