Wind of Moors

I mentioned before that black metal bands doing all ambient albums really become less impressive if you're already familiar with the greater ambient genre. Unless you're able to do something to make it really stand out, ambient music will just fall into this very run-of-the-mill feeling. This is the fate of Marblebog's ambient album, Wind of Moors. Marblebog have managed to endure the entirety of the 2000s without truly distinguishing themselves and it's just as well that they make a bland attempt at ambient.

The individual tracks don't suffer from faults of their own, rather they all have the same problem: they all have a melody that's just looped for 10 minutes or so. They try to throw in some extra sounds within the first two minutes but they're easily forgotten as they're just folded into the loop as well. There's no other variance, just this lazy repetition. Sound-wise, the music itself sounds like the neoclassical midi keyboard material that Varg was doing with Burzum about ten years prior, but even Varg had the decency to throw in some movement in his all ambient albums with the bonus that one of them had tracks that were relatively short. Likewise, the most tolerable track on here is the shortest and final one, "Beyond".

Wind of Moors is boring and pointless. I don't care how fanatical you are about obscure eastern European black metal, I don't see any reason why you'd want to listen to this unless you had no standards at all or were completely oblivious to the greater catalog of quality ambient releases.

Marblebog, the Hungarian one-man black ambient metal project, is known for its approach toward black metal. Eschewing the wall of sound riffing that a lot of black metal bands are known for, Marblebog goes the way of bands like Summoning and Vinterriket, playing black metal sort of with the tone of Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, while adding ambience with synthesizers and other electronic instruments.

So it comes as a suprise that this album, Wind of Moors, is an all ambient album. Marblebog does the black ambient metal style so well, that this seems totally unnecessary. But the fact is, this album is very well made. Each ambient track has some interesting soundscapes that flow well from one section to another. The whole album runs very well together, I barely noticed that the songs changed. Some sections are more minimalist than others (the final track was, IMO, more like Velvet Cacoon's Bete Noir toward the end), but this variation makes this album interesting. And of course, the quality of the music that we've come to expect from this project is there, and makes this album an enjoyable listen. I hope there's another all-ambient album in the horizon.