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The Mist from the Mountains – Portal – The Gathering of Storms Review

By Doom_et_Al

In my review of The Mist from the Mountains’ first album, Monumental – The Temple of Twilight, I cheekily compared it to a pleasing, albeit very plain, cup of hot chocolate. It was slick and enjoyable, without anything that really separated it from a dozen other epic melo-black albums. Truthfully, it left my brain the moment I submitted the review. So when the follow-up appeared in the promo sump, I initially didn’t even recognize that I had come across these Finns before. After some gentle “reminding” from the bosses, I found the sophomore album in my inbox. With the days getting shorter and the leaves turning a pleasing shade of red, I can always do with a cup of the good stuff, I suppose. As I began imbibing, I couldn’t help but wonder: have The Mist from the Mountains supplied anything more interesting this time round?

The Mist from the Mountains aim for the epic, melodic black metal we expect from Moonsorrow or Shylmagoghnar. Yes, this means songs that are a minimum of 8 minutes in length, with 3 extending beyond 10 minutes. But whereas Monumental clocked in a relatively manageable 37 minutes, Portal is a more ambitious beast, heading closer to the hour mark. It’s not just the length that has been expanded; every element of Monumental, from the cleans, to the female vocals, to the orchestral passages, has been dialled up. In hot chocolate terms, Portal is a bigger and stronger cup, no doubt. MOAR hot chocolate, if you will. But despite what the banner of our site reads, this isn’t always a good thing.

Take a look at that cover. Try to ignore the overly portentous title with three different fonts. While each component is fine, I find the whole absolutely unconvincing. Not for a single moment do I believe there is a mountain with a weird door in it leading to a different landscape. The dimensions are wrong; the framing is a bit weird. And that sums up much of Portal. Individually, the elements within are solid (the black metal black metals, the symphony symphonizes, etc.), and superficially, it holds together. But on deeper inspection, it simply doesn’t persuade. Much of this has to do, I suspect, with a lack of identity. The band apes so many different styles (“The Seer of the Ages” is straight from Jumalten Aika, “In Longing Times” wouldn’t be out of place in Atoma, “And So Flew the Death Crow” is Emergence-adjacent), and whips between them so rapidly, that beyond wanting to be EPIC, I’m still not sure exactly what sound defines The Mist from the Mountains. As any fortune cookie wisdom will tell you, if you don’t know who you are, you won’t know where you’re going.

The rapid shifts in style also make it difficult to settle in and enjoy the grandeur of the album because you’re constantly being snapped in a new direction. Writing long-form songs is hard, and too often The Mist from the Mountains leap between styles haphazardly instead of making organic and logical shifts. This is especially frustrating because there are extended sections where Portal is really good. “Among the Black Waves” very effectively combines a lovely first half of operatic-type female vocals with a scorching second half of furious blast beats. It’s lovely and compelling at the same time. But its power is leeched by the preceding “At the Roots of Vile” which is all over the place, stylistically. This stop-start dynamic makes listening to the entirety of Portal a distinctly moist, uneven experience.

Listening to Portal is frustrating. The Mist from the Mountains clearly took on board criticism that their first album was too shiny and bland, and decided to up the ante in almost every way. But, two albums in, they have yet to fully define their own sound. This lack of direction results in an album with great moments, but a limited confidence to sustain them. To return to the hot chocolate analogy: haphazardly throwing cool ingredients into a cup doesn’t necessarily improve the taste, nor does making it richer. The band needs to go back to the drawing board and decide what taste they’re going for and build from there. If they don’t, we will continue to get the empty calories on offer with Portal.

Rating: 2.5 cups of hot chocolate/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Primitive Reaction
Websites: primitivereaction.bandcamp.com/album/portal-the-gathering-of-storms
Releases Worldwide: October 11th, 2024

#25 #BlackMetal #FinnishMetal #Moonsorrow #Oct24 #PrimitiveReaction #Review #Reviews #Shylmagoghnar #TheMistFromTheMountains

Throat – Blood Exaltation Review

By Dear Hollow

I’m gonna sound like an absolute madman when I say this, but Blood Exaltation is what I wanted Ad Nauseam’s Imperative Imperceptible Impulse to be. Poland’s Throat is neither dissonant nor death metal, and their aesthetic resides in tired and trve approaches of blackened occultism and evil in the shadow of religious alienation. However, there is a distinct and tantalizing array of clattering and creaking, a dusty and organic quality that settles like hard night on an old church, the tension of ancient voices crackling through haunted halls. The promo makes comparisons to Cultes des Ghoules, Necromantia, and early Samael in this unholy union of second-wave intensity with ancient occultism. Throat creaks and rattles and vomits its blackened witchery across Blood Exaltation in a surprisingly effective, if imperfect, second-wave experience.

Poland’s Throat takes cues from black metal’s unhallowed halls, perhaps unsurprisingly, and the chaos instilled in Blood Exaltation borders the Signal Rex-core blackened edginess of acts like Irae or Ancient Burial. However, the sound is described as “catacombed, ancient, unsettling,” and the existential occult dread that courses through every fiber is palpable. Blood Exaltation could technically be considered an EP, with opening songs “Chuć” and “Klątwa”1 preceding a re-release of their 2020 demo material, the two parts of “New Flesh Nectar.” While the sound quality between the two halves is stark and impacts the quality of Blood Exaltation, the songwriting is undeniably solid, lending itself to Throat’s limitless potential.

Black metal, particularly its raw inbred cousin, has a stereotype for kvlt aesthetic overcompensation and makes its corpse-painted ilk difficult to take seriously. Throat feels dangerous in ways that few can hold a candle to, such as the aforementioned Cultes des Ghoules or more recent output by Misotheist or Leviathan: fiery and intense but willing to dwell in its existential devastation. Both halves of Blood Exaltation feel fresh, frantic and intense but fluid in jaggedness and discomfort. “Chuć” embraces the unhinged vocal quality of Amnutseba in a feral combination of shrieks, shouts, moans, and howls alongside the shifting sands of raw chords and punk beats that slow down for the satisfying doom-influenced conclusion, while more atmospheric pulses and room noise saturate the negative spaces of “Klątwa” alongside a satisfying groove. While much rawer, the two parts of “New Flesh Nectar” feel like apt conclusions to the newer tracks, with more aggressive percussion and vicious death growls dominating alongside epic and victorious chord progressions with sinister melodic flourishes. Throat do what they can to ensure that the two disparate soundscapes are reconciled through a progression that encompasses the whole album.

The most glaring issue with Blood Exaltation is that, despite their best efforts, the two halves are jarringly disparate in sound. “Chuć” and “Klątwa” are darker and cleaner, with wild vocals and bass more pronounced, while raw black tropes dominate the two parts of “New Flesh Nectar” alongside a more traditional blackened screech with sparse death growls. While the songwriting attempts to smoothen this divide, Throat can do very little to remedy it without a solid rerecording of the New Flesh Nectar demo. As it stands, it nearly singlehandedly keeps Blood Exaltation from excellence despite the more dynamic songwriting of the “New Flesh Nectar” duo. On a more nitpicking level, some passages of “Chuć” are repeated too long, while the intro of “Klątwa” denotes the track as atmospheric before slapping you with a blazing riff. As is the case for this style of ugly music, and even more so for this creaking and groaning interpretation of black metal, it will not be for everyone. Blood Exaltation is caustic and unforgiving, eerie and dense, and requires myriad listens to breach the veil.

Throat ultimately makes one hell of an impression with Blood Exaltation, creating a breed of black metal that remains neatly within the lanes of the style while also twisting it into a terrifying, ancient sound. Its excellence is derailed by the soundscape differences between the new tracks and the inclusion of the New Flesh Nectar demo, but nevertheless feels raw, punishing, and amorphous in ways that recall the genre greats as well as other styles, including Ad Nauseam. Black metal ought to be terrifying again, and Throat makes a fantastic case for it.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Primitive Reaction
Websites: tøø kvlt før yøv
Releases Worldwide: February 9th, 2024

#2024 #35 #AdNauseam #Amnutseba #AncientBurial #BlackMetal #BloodExaltation #CultesDesGhoules #Feb24 #Irae #Leviathan #Misotheist #Necromantia #PolishMetal #PrimitiveReaction #RawBlackMetal #Review #Reviews #Samael #Throat