Fans of last year’s impressive and angst-ridden Clearing Path album Watershed Between Earth And Firmament, will be no doubt looking forward to this one. Watershed… was a barrage of black metal-fed emotion and well worth checking out. However, Summit takes a different path and should certainly not be regarded as a follow-up even though the talents of band mastermind, Italy’s Gabriele Gramaglia, are clearly once more on display. Gramaglia is this time flexing his creative muscles in all sorts of directions but which can be broadly described as post-black metal while throwing in elements of doom. Gramaglia combines the jarring discord of the likes of Deathspell Omega with sweeping ambience in an album whose backbone is some cracking, granular production.
The Neurosis-style opener Hymn of the Forlorn Wayfarer nicely sets the scene for the album, building and piling on the pressure with creeping melodies spliced into single note chord picking that eventually rise into some crashing riffs. It’s an atmospheric if slightly uneventful opener which works best during its drifting, spiralling second half when the discord falls away into an extended single sound. The-10 minute opener is then followed by a track which then takes a subtly different tack. Beginning again with sharper, angular riffs it segues into some nice dual vocal effects, smooth keyboards and doom-like atmospheres. It then peaks with some disaggregated black metal sounds – with the picked, clockwork guitars, blast beats and keyboards all given their own space in the production – which is all very entertaining to hear, and quite different from the first track.
But I’m beginning to wonder what this is all for and where we’re going with it. Then, we’re already onto the centrepiece of the album with a cool ambient section, The Winds That Forestall Thy Return Part 1, and all too soon into jarring riffs of Winds… Part 2, a meandering study into Summit’s own brand of extreme music, and a final ambient passage. It’s all perfectly worthy and I wouldn’t blame anyone for enjoying this more than I did. Because the merit here is in the subtle hues, the structure and the craftsmanship of this album and perhaps, therefore, a little too worthy for the likes of me. It also isn’t aided by its own brevity and, for a full-length album, three tracks proper and two ambient tracks the exploration felt to me like it was cut a bit short.
There are some interesting elements here that will probably get those who are interested in the progressive or more jazzy edges of extreme music in a lather. There’s also obviously oodles of talent at play too but even so I still felt it difficult to grasp what might be the central theme here beyond some smart music craft and those angular riffs hitting against the sweet ambience. A musical exploration with some interesting emotional shades but to what end I’m still not sure.
(7/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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