The owls have been beaming their strange and disturbing smile at us now for five years and by chance, luck, or providence I have been with them since their debut album Desolation. I have seen this curiously monikered project of Nre’s blossom, or maybe manifest might be a better word as only the shadows know what kind of flowers this music might conjure.

But things end and this is to be the final album it seems. So, what are the parting words?

‘Every Day Another Piece Of Me Is Removed’ lowers what little light we have and the slow, melancholy guitars and xylophone like notes are pushed most gently aside by the slow swell of the riff. The vocals are raw, as though coming from the corner of some derelict cottage. Then that melody surges beautiful and heart rending. Clean vocals add to the echoes of this room, like memories of these lost parts tumbling through the cracks… Moments of stillness, despair in spoken words, not wanting company but needing to speak regardless. The contradictions of misery, isolation and company bound together beautifully.

‘Monochrome Visions Of What Life Used To Be’ has, until the harrowing vocals return, an almost old Katatonia feel to the cold, misty but somehow deeply intimate sound. And even after the vocals come you never escape its presence. I often think of ANTOAS as this old house or cottage, in a dismal but still somehow magnificent landscape. Rooms are bare, wood broken and rotten but the voices are still here, screaming to be heard. Pleading to be listened to. Fading, but clinging on.

‘In Darkness Light Candles So The Demons Can Find Me’ has a sway to it, a lilt to the clean vocals that like Fellwarden has that unnatural ability through melody to show the faintest of colours in the gloom but to still leave you lost in bleak mists. Exquisite.

‘Winter’s Elegy Part II’ like Part I from The Comforting Grip Of Misery album is a folk woven lament or warning. Beautifully phrased clean female vocals (apologies, I have no name) and a lone guitar are joined by a male voice and percussion but the simplicity and touch remains. Winter comes with its beauty and its warning.

‘The Miserable Grip Of Comfort’ is almost, almost, up-tempo. There is a drive to it, an anxiety that pushes it harder than what has come previously.  A snatch of a walk in the woods, an owl mocking maybe, seep.in as the energy fades but that only seems to rekindle the discomfort of this song.

‘There Is No Laughter Here’ steps along that strange perimeter walk betwixt deeply atmospheric black metal and the feel of funeral doom. It is absent of when the concept of hope, the dark chorus of despair painful and raw. ‘L’Appel Du Vide’ the final notes in that house and its final reminder as you try to leave.

But as you do, there is one last moment. A strange, but bittersweet moment appropriate to this moment. A familiar trickle of notes in slow downpour, a tune you know. An eerie and devastating breath across your neck. ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’ by Radiohead pouring out from the soul of Nre. A last moment of pain expressed.

And they are gone.

And Now The Owls Are Smiling have been one of those curious, unique, emotional bands that the UKBM scene births. I have treasured every moment I have spent in their company, every emotion they have evoked in me and every time I needed someone there when I wanted to be alone they were waiting

Whatever Nre does next, or doesn’t, I can only wish him well and that for him it is the path to take.

A perfect goodbye.

(..fade out…)

(9/10 Gizmo)

https://www.facebook.com/andnowtheowlsaresmiling

https://clobberrecords.bandcamp.com/album/and-now-the-owls-are-smiling-epitaph