Ever had the feeling you’re on to a hiding to nothing with trying to review an album? I was so taken with the last album by Finnish black metal/dungeon synth project Druadan Forest (the domain of V-Khaoz) that I bought their back catalogue. That last album was a quite transportive work, full of the epic and the introspective and the creation of a fantasy world. Black metal vocals and swathes of keyboards vying with the harsher edges.
This is a step… Sideways?
What we have here is an entirely instrumental, entirely keyboard based work of pure dark ambient. The kind of thing that might be at home on Cryo Chamber in fact. It is a piece of cosmic atmosphere, dark in places yes but also with passages of glittering wonder and light.
It is curious that although the individual passages move you on to the next, the overall feeling is akin to being held in pockets of stasis. Clouds or pools of being become your world where the wash of keyboards and the delicate other sounds sometimes like footsteps, other times like water or whispering air or the approach of something far darker the only points of reference.
Some of this, such as the rich and dark ‘Enraptured By Esoteric Fiery Storms’ remind me of those early 90s days when Arcana were starting out or Akhenaton brought us Divine Symphonies, other times just the hint, the merest touch of Filosofem.
And there is the problem. What more can I say? The album is genuinely quite full of wonder; the gentle and slow waves of keyboards ebb and flow. The weaving of other sounds, bells, tinkling ice creating each new space. Each portal I guess. But they pass you on so create a sense of progression through the album and the tracks waypoints along the journey.
It is hard to conjure other words to describe such ambient realms. It is more a thing to experience without them in fact. What I can say is that this may be a shift in direction but it is still woven and displayed with all the touch and vision of their previous forays.
Relaxing, full of wonder and gentle; Portals allows you to drift between the spheres, an observer of vast movements and unknown motives but resplendent in their majesty. A journey worth taking indeed.
(8/10 Gizmo)
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