This album is “a lyrical concept called ‘Mörkrets Kärna’: an album-trilogy about falling down a pit of your darkest being, losing yourself completely and desperately trying to make sense of it”. Moloken come from the same place geographically, and in certain ways musically as Cult of Luna. Knowing all this, I prepared myself for a bleak experience.
This experimental work is indeed bleak and obscure. The marching sounds which open the album are reminiscent of a punishment camp. We are then launched into a grey, harsh world, followed by a series of distant sounds which appropriately are titled “I Can’t Hear You”. Strangely I thought I heard the distant sound of a Buddhist temple in there. I must be going mad. No time to consider that, as the short and sinister “Burst” leads unto still darker territory. “Seventh Circle” plods on grimly, driven by the ominous drum beat and persistent riff. Chaos and despair are reflected in the vocals and enveloping sound. A deliberate industrial passage impresses itself on the brain before we get back to the business of harsh vocals and despairing turbulence. There’s another little interlude with the delicate and faintly eastern “Wreckage” before a return to the clanking black metal march “I Dig Deeper”. The distortion in the sound and pattern are strongly reminiscent of Ephel Duath. The depths are dredged, to the accompaniment of a colourful drum run, then the mood and sounds become almost funereal, escaping into an echoing cosmos. This contrasts with the dismally sad and orchestral “Beginning of the End”, which with the mystifying enhancement of a bright drum patter, brings the album to a suitably bleak finish.
This album came across to me like a series of distinct and often indistinct images, so I guess that trying to make sense of such experimentation is not the right thing to do. With its shorter sections and longer explorations of different kinds of obscurity, I found “All Is Left to See” disjointed and as a listening experience more difficult than was necessary.
(6/10 Andrew Doherty)
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