Desolate North

Desolate North takes the entire first demo (titled Ashen) and makes the songs cleaner. The atmosphere is stronger than before, thanks to the production. In addition to Ashen’s five returning tracks, you get two more instrumentals that sound folk in essence, and the last song that strays from the main composition. There’s an excellent amount of variation with this record that won’t leave you depleted.

Into This Earth of Shallow Intent sounds just as good as its demo, if not better. Same for Ashen (the outro track), but that’s mainly because of the better production. The title track which serves as the first instrumental, I can’t tell if it’s a harp, or a very effected acoustic guitar. Whatever it is, it‘s beautiful. Simple and enjoyable. Hinterland, which perfectly fits the band’s only theme, inserts more of the same melodies as the first track. I think they mostly fit for background purposes, but their execution is great, nonetheless.

The first three songs sound about the same, though the production provided clearer details of the music. Haunting Cries Beneath the Lake Where Our Queen Once Walked‘s slow melody with the chorus pedal is smoother, louder, and bone-chilling. Tanner’s long scream/shriek is more haunting than the demo, while the death growl is monstrous. Lamentations in the Citadel of God, being the heaviest song, almost sounds as if the band dragged the demo version and added it into this album. So it’s nothing special other than the slow guitar melodies sounding crisp. It remains a great song, though. Thule (formerly titled The Sun, the Whore and the Moon) sounds just as good as the demo, but even better. The melodies are brighter in tone, and the delivery is much more powerful.

Waldländer im Herbst (Woodlands in Autumn, in English) is the last and only original song recorded for this album, and this bastard takes a huge turn. It will erase the 25+ minutes of beautiful melodies you just heard, worth of three songs. Could be the epitome of the subgenre. It’s ugly, scary, gloomy, eviscerating whatever stands in its way; with shattering power chords and unearthly death growls. Take the nature samples used in the background and imagine as the animals evaporate. As the song progresses, you get some frightening keyboard notes with weak screaming and later transitioning to prettier fluke notes. Overall, an unpredictable song.

It’s like the band took Ashen and gave it a whole new meaning and sound. That would sound like Desolate North needed the demo’s content to boost it. That sounds rather disrespectful. Desolate North mainly used Ashen to perfect the band’s sound and content, while delivering folk and very darkening aspects to the music. So they’re both perfect releases, even though the latter offers more music and length. Tanner Anderson recorded this masterpiece during when he was “kinda“ shelving his black metal project. Though now that it became his primary band in the reformation as Obsequiae, his melodic skill and creativity is as pretty as it’s scary with Celestiial. I think it’s quite obvious that the new song is the best song, but I still enjoyed the beautiful and clearer melodies of the first and third songs - and all the instrumentals never failed to amaze me.

The funeral doom underground is tough territory to navigate. What you hear through the grapevine is the genre is almost uniformly of high quality – to translate, this means that bands tend to be praised for playing in the style at all rather than for doing it particularly well. Since playing funeral doom “at all” requires a level of musical skill on par with a retarded chimpanzee, the genre's a free pass into the world of deep and meaningful art, as its simplicity makes it equally undemanding for artist and listener alike. Ergo, it's mostly useless.

I singled Celestiial out of the crowd and bought this disc largely because sole musician Tanner Anderson seems to hate the “scene”, such at it is, about as much as I do. If you spy an attempted artist prattling on about how great it is to join the burgeoning and ever-growing funeral doom scene and that it's so great that there are so many wonderful bands bringing all these great new ideas to the genre, get out quick. If, on the other hand, he says he's completely disillusioned with the style as it currently exists but he likes some of the old bands... well, there's a chance at least.

There's a lot wrong with this album, to be frank; for starters, the distorted guitars are horribly recorded for most of the album. I've read a couple reviews that state that there's no distorted guitar on the album at all, which, although incorrect and a clear sign that writers in question should really stop reviewing music, goes to show how weak and indistinct in the production they are. Without their presence the clean guitar melodies are left to wander alone, sounding overly simplistic and repetitive – presumably much more than they would otherwise. This album is certainly sparse enough without production problems leaving us with even less to hear. Sometimes it almost does just sound like an ambient recording of forest sounds.

The programmed drums are on autopilot, the vocals are merely what you'd expect, and there are a few instrumental tracks that feature a grand total of one instrument apiece. It's all to easy too simply tune out the entire album, at times.

I'm still glad I bought it, because the authenticity and sincerity does come through in the music. Celestiial's apparent claim to originality rests on some unusual instruments (like a harp) and the various ambient woodland creature sounds mixed into the recording, but those are trivial. What's more important is the distinctive atmosphere and unique perspective... and the fact that the music does have a perspective and a spark of creativity behind it. The way this project uses sonic space and ambiance is promising, perhaps only needing a little development. In spite of technical imperfections, this album seems to “get it” in ways many better-produced and more professional bands never will. I will be keeping a sharp eye out for the next release and pass along a qualified recommendation for this one.

Funeral Doom- a great, if slightly hard-to-take genre. The slow as hell riffs and drums, and the general focus on all that's extremely depressing can occasionally be rewarding, but in the wrong hand, it must sound terrible (I'm only assuming it would suck, as I don't have too much Funeral Doom yet- just all the greats, Thergothon, DIsembowelment, Skepticism etc.) Luckily, this isn't a terrible album by any means- it's just quite hard to take.

Celestiial traffic in an extremely sparse kind of funeral doom. It's almost sparse enough to become Dark Ambient, and it's certainly not something most people would call metal. To me, it sounds a bit like a Blackened, droney Von-era Sigur Ros- just covered in Reverb, slow and very mysterious. Generally, each song consists of a few different things- the super low tuned, extremely quiet guitars that give everything a warm, bassy background, the reverbed, screamed/growled vocals that make an occaisonal apperance, the slow, pounding drums, and the main mood carriers- the sparse clean guitars and the nature sounds. The nature sounds fit in really well with the music- in fact, I didn't notice most of them the first time round. But they are there, and they add a huge amount to the songs.

Everything on this album is covered in reverb- but that makes this album good. This music doesn't need max clarity, and the walls of sound that this reverb summons up is impressive. The reverb brings out the emotion, the despair, but also the dark beauty that is in this recording. Whoever mixed it did a pretty good job.

So, to most of the people who are reading this, the above description probably sounds pretty sweet- and while it is pretty damn good, it doesn't always work as well as it should. One simple problem is the lack of progression in some of the songs. Of course, some may say that this is the point of funeral doom, and I would agree to an extent, but Funeral DOom isn't like Drone- the songs need to have a real sense of completion, while drone and ambient are more about the soundscapes, and thus a proper ending isn't as important. Maybe these songs are intended as dark ambient, but to me, they are funeral doom, and a bit more structure would be good. Another problem is the cymbals. I don't mind the occasional terrible bit of drum programming- but with every song having the super loud cymbal clash every beat, it really does get annoying. I don't know why it's mixed so high.

The final problem is the terrible track order. If you look at the track lengths on winamp/windows media player/itunes/whatever, you would notice that there's 4 short tracks and 4 long ones. So surely it would make sense to mix them around a bit? Not so. The first 4 out of 5 are all interludes, and then we're left with 3 epic doom tunes, which is a bit much.

Still, these problems aren't all that bad as such. Bad track order.. fairly bad cymbals and the occasional lack of progressions in the songs. Really, that's not that bad a thing. While I would recommend this, let me just remind you all that this is fairly slow funeral doom, so it's an acquired taste.

Celestiial is a one-man project hailing from the northern woods of Minnesota. Don’t be fooled by the black-and-white artwork, the wintry, Scandinavian-sounding album title or the fact that the band’s name seems lifted straight out of the Black Legions’ guestbook (Mutiilation, anyone?) – this is not raw, necro black metal at all. Desolate North is much more concerned with conveying the feeling of true alienated despair than with adhering to Northern genre standards. This has much more in common with the doomed creeping blackness of Nortt than the chainsaw gutsfucking of Torgeist or Vlad Tepes.

Celestiial’s sound can be simply described as funeral doom, but there’s much more to it than that. The title proves to be something of a misnomer – as desolate as the album admittedly is, it lacks that icy coldness that good black metal tends to capture so well. Instead of envisioning frozen lakes and snow-topped mountains, you find yourself wandering through a forest, alone save for the sounds of nature that envelop you. A primary component to Celestiial’s music is the use of natural sounds – birds chirping, wind blowing through trees, raindrops falling, sounds you’d hear while walking alone in the forest at night. This natural accompaniment makes his own vocals seem even more disembodied and hollow, and enriches the droning soundscapes that he’s created. As spacey and barren as the songs are, the impossibly-low-tuned guitars and aforementioned nature sounds add depth and fullness, so the songs never seem as sparse or minimalist as most ambient tracks come across as. There is a measure of blackness to be found on here, particularly in the production value and guitar tones, though they’re more Xasthur or recent Nachtmystium than Darkthrone, and the black metal influence is often lost within the waves of droning ambience.

The first song, “In this Earth of Shallow Intent,” employs a gossamer melody underlain by a chorus of crickets and whippoorwills to set the tone for the rest of the album; the forest sounds persist throughout the album, and really aid Celestiial in developing an entirely unique sound. Desolate North doesn’t sound like anything else you’ve heard this year – it’s as hard to pin down as the wind, and as delicate as flower petal. Yes, delicate; there are plenty of doomy dirges present, and the tempo’s just shy of lifeless, but there are moments of melody buried in the shadows. This is truly a beautiful album, one that I’d recommend to any fan of funeral doom, or of ethereal, ambient, atmospheric music, or old Agalloch and Disembowelment; to any doomed soul, and to all who hear the forest calling out their names.