Jade – Mysteries of a Flowery Dream Review

By Owlswald

Dreams are a gateway into the unconscious, a space where thoughts and emotions flow freely. They reveal what we often conceal, offering a unique and often unsettling insight into our inner worlds. Barcelonian quartet Jade explores this very terrain with their sophomore album Mysteries of a Flowery Dream. Emerging with 2018’s Smoking Mirror EP, Jade forges an atmo-death sound rooted in early death, doom, and black metal, fusing it with the dark and melancholic atmospheres of contemporaries like The Ruins of Beverast and Bølzer. Their 2022 debut, The Pacification of Death, plunged listeners into obscure depths with heavy, bleak, and hypnotic arrangements plastered with charismatic guitar melodies. 2024’s split EP with Sanctuarium, The Sempiternal Wound, followed, adding an aura of the occult to Jade’s nightmarish death/doom/black framework. With Burke’s visceral Ixchel portrayal adorning the cover,1 Jade now navigates the intense and dreamy dialogue between conscious and subconscious states with Mysteries.

Characterized by dark, murky and oscillating arrangements, Jade’s immersive sound reaches new heights on Mysteries. While not overtly technical or flashy, Mysteries’ enhanced atmosphere and sonic depth build upon The Sempiternal Wound, highlighting Jade’s superb songwriting. Oppressive, swirling tremolos and grimy palm-muted drawls meld with deep, thundering rhythms and fiendish growls to saturate lucid and dramatic songs with a sense of desperation. Opposing these haunting manifestations are stretches of defiant melodicism, with charming doom (“Darkness in Movement,” “The Stars’ Shelter”) and power-tinged (“9th Episode”) leads and solos that defuse Mysteries’ prevailing darkness with emotive force. J.’s bellowing and grandiose clean vocal passages—reminiscent of Sulphur Aeon’s M. and Ihsahn—add ephemeral surges of anguish and ethereality that lift one above the shadows. Although Jade’s sound may appear somewhat modest at first blush, Mysteries is a sensory-rich experience that demands patience but is well worth your time and attention.

Jade has precisely composed each of Mysteries’ seven tracks to guide one through their feverish vision. The album’s structure holds together extremely well thanks to excellent songwriting. Jade masterfully employs recurrent themes and soaring guitar leads and solos, seamlessly weaving Mysteries’ forty-three minutes into a unified entity. Swirling occult-like chanting and drum thrashes on “Shores of Otherness” underpin harmonious guitar swells while “Light’s Blood’s” robust and ascendent notes rise amidst spells of high-low tremolos. The classic Pink Floyd-enthused solo on interlude “The Stars’ Shelter (II)” soars above dark reverberated arpeggiations, contributing to Mysteries’ overall unity even as it explores different stylistic territory. Like different images of one mysterious and unsettling dream, Mysteries elicits a keen sense of cohesion. Yet, this doesn’t come at the expense of variation. “9th Episode” displays a galloping, urgent cadence with a meaner, anxiety-ridden edge while “The Stars’ Shelter (II)” offers a crucial moment of respite with its crestfallen touch. Through meticulous construction and contrasting elements, Jade has crafted an album that is cohesive and dynamic in equal measure.

For Jade’s caliber to shine, the album’s production better be on point and thankfully, Mysteries delivers in spades. Sounding vast and dynamic in my headphones, the vivid master illuminates every facet of Jade’s dream-like world. With guitars at its core, the mix carves out ample space for the supporting instrumentation to showcase their worth. As a result, each listen feels as exciting as the next—A testament to Mysteries’ complexity and sophistication. However, this intricacy also presents a challenge for passive listening. Despite its quality, I initially found Mysteries rather mundane and predictable due to the album’s similar traits blurring tracks like “Darkness in Movement” and “A Flowery Dream” together. But much like the gradual awakening from an intense dream, Mysteries’ hidden appeal surfaced once I gave it my undivided attention. From that point, my impressions quickly evolved into appreciation, and I found myself drawn back to Mysteries’ surreal world with regularity.

Demanding a conscious presence, atmo-death fans would be remiss to overlook Mysteries. Though Jade’s sound may seem ordinary at first, the sheer density and weight of Mysteries’ intricate sound takes time and patience to decode. But those who actively immerse themselves in Jade’s expansive world will be handsomely rewarded. The excellent songwriting, replete with its cohesion, balance, and dynamism, is impressive, steadily shifting my initial apathetic impressions to genuine appreciation. So don your finest headphones, sit bac,k and let Jade immerse you in their dreamlike world.

Rating: Very Good!
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Pulverised Records
Websites: emperorjade.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/jadestonemask
Releases Worldwide: May 9, 2025

#2025 #35 #AtmosphericDeathMetal #Bolzer #DeathDoom #DeathMetal #Ihsahn #Jade #May25 #MysteriesOfAFloweryDream #PinkFloyd #PulverisedRecords #Review #Reviews #SpanishMetal #SulphurAeon #TheRuinsOfBeverast

Auf zum Südpol! #primordial #zealandardor #bölzer

Aphotic – Abyssgazer [Things You Might Have Missed 2023]

By Dolphin Whisperer

Evil. No matter what flowery progressive, flamboyantly triumphant path metal may weave, a large part of what attracted many of us, and a large part of what inspires creators, rests in distilling evil into dark vibrations, wallowing wails, and crooked melodies. Previously in this mindset, Italy’s Nicolò Brambilla (voice, synths1) and Giovanni Piazza (guitars) have presented this energy with cosmic funeral doom act Fuoco Fatuo, and contrastingly with the bursting and churning riffcraft of Brambilla’s 90s-inspired death metal troupe Ekpyrosis. Aphotic,2 born of this grime-crusted pedigree, swings with a ritualistic fervor from ripping blast to reverb-drenched howl to conjure the unique, reeking atmosphere that pervades Abyssgazer. Evil lurks in every phrase.

As such, Abyssgazer presents as the kind of echoing incantation that must ring through ears from first to last note. No mere synthesis of the acts who fed Aphotic into existence, this sometimes blackened, sometimes funeral doom-weighted, always death metal assembly expresses itself in a peerless manner. The cavernous kick pummels that split air to render space for discordant guitar screeches recall the thunderous energy of a lurching Immolation. The breakaways into bouncing rhythms with layered and resonant vocal chants recall the anthemic black metal of Rotting Christ, albeit with a bend toward the psychedelic. The hypnotic kit hammering and looped lead melodies exist as a twisted Godflesh instance manifested as a death metal sacrifice. In hands less mindful, and in engineering fine-tuned by Esoteric’s Greg Chandler—a mind of similar persuasion but much longer in phrasing—Abyssgazer could have flown off its experimental rails.

Instead, disarmingly so, Abyssgazer flows naturally from idea to idea, with each long-form statement having a strong central identity. A trio of world-building breaths intersperse the heaviest moments: “Endzeit I,” a slow percussive build before a shattering blast beat open; “Endzeit II,” an eerie, reverberating acoustic segue before an even squirmier post-informed eruption; “Endzeit III,” a menacing synth-scraping the hisses toward the punishing conclusion. As contemporaries to Bölzer and Tongues, Aphotic finds its death metal rooting not in loud, chunky chords but rather in snaking progressions that rumble through low-end tremolo drills (“Spectral Degredation,” “Depths Call Depths”) and whip with phasing arpeggio force (“Cosmivore,” “Chasmous”). Nothing summons the dark lord like a lumbering, hazy legato.

On early listens, though, equally due to loaded layers of ambient electronic and modulated metal elements, Abyssgazer may struggle to brand its choices into memory. It’s the journey that forms first: the brutalist bashing that kicks off the descent (“Spectral Degradation”), the bellow and choir that won’t stop ringing (“Deathward and Beyond,” “Horizonless”), the summoning dirge that announces collapse (“Chasmous”). The swinging riffs and recursive melodies stitch these points together (“Cosmivore,” “Abyssgazer”). Until a martial spirit reveals itself along the path (“Cosmivore,” “Horizonless”). Everything always moves forward.

Abyssgazer reads less like a grand novel and more like a short story, ultimately. Its tools well worn and non-gratuitous, the time that elapses over this debut’s course never feels overstayed. Aphotic has the power to warp time in their meticulous and death-carved hands. So as exciting as Abyssgazer lands, and much, in the same way, it lures the listener along, the next step along this band’s career promises even more.

Tracks to Check Out: “Spectral Degradation,” “Depths Call Depths,” “Chasmous”3

#2023 #Abyssgazer #Aphotic #AtmosphericDeathMetal #Bedsore #BlackMetal #BlackenedDeathMetal #Bolzer #DeathMetal #Ekpyrosis #Esoteric #FuocoFatuo #Godflesh #ItalianMetal #NuclearWinterRecords #PostDeathMetal #RottingChrist #SentientRuinLaboratories #ThingsYouMightHaveMissed #ThingsYouMightHaveMissed2023 #Tongues

Schweizer Metalfreunde! Am Karfreitag, 7.4., organisiere ich in der Schüür Luzern einen Talk über Metal & Religion u.a. mit Okoi Jones von #Bölzer, danach spielen #Schammasch. Würde mich freuen, den einen oder die andere aus der TL zu sehen & danke für Spreading the Gospel!

https://www.schuur.ch/programm/events/event-details/metal-talk-heavy-metal-religion-konzert-schammasch-07-04-2023-konzerthaus-schuur-luzern/