Register Forgot login?

© 2002-2024
Encyclopaedia Metallum

Privacy Policy

Kladovest > Kladovest > Reviews
Kladovest - Kladovest

there are not enough snores in my body for this - 36%

Noktorn, March 13th, 2010

I truly, truly wish black metal bands would stop using this sort of production. Does anyone actually like this sort of Xasthuresque overly synthetic guitar wash? The rhythm guitars have no power, stripped of it by what sounds like a line-in recording process, and the leads are irritatingly compressed and incisive, and the presentation ends up sounding less like the swirling ambient soundscape they had planned and more like a cheap bedroom recording with too many effects.

Kladovest plays minimal, sort of ambient black metal like a bad Branikald or Astrofaes. Some of the riffs occasionally remind me of Bloodaxe's slower, more droning passages; the tempo of Kladovest never really rises above a midpaced gallop, not that the programmed drums would make anything faster sound like anything but a cascade of cheap hi-hat and white noise. I have to again harp on the production: everything is so distorted and drenched in reverb that it just turns into an ambient sludge without any motion to it. This isn't to say with better production this would be a worthwhile album, because Kladovest's songwriting is fundamentally dull and listless. Did you think something unusual would happen with the wryly melodic riff that opens 'Mourned By Twilight Wind', which brings to mind a black metal 'Dead Skin Mask'? No, of course not. Kladovest is just a generic ambient black metal band that cribs ideas from some of the more popular Blazebirth Hall artists and has absolutely no identity as a conclusion.

The songwriting of this album is painfully lazy; every new riff seems to be introduced in the same way: stop drums, keep guitars going, kick drums in after one or two repetitions, like a retarded version of 'In The Nightside Eclipse' but with even less subtlety. The way leads are introduced is similarly predictable and when they emerge they do nothing to actually add to the music; they just kind of linger around harmonizing with the rhythm guitars in a very simplistic display of complexity. The riffs themselves are boring and static; Kladovest lurches around the same general chord sets constantly throughout this album and never manages to wrangle a relatively interesting melody out of them, sticking with what is essentially a low-budget Drudkh sense of style and taste. It's quite bad.

I can't see the sort of person this appeals to unless you've just heard Slavic black metal for the first time so the style itself is incredibly novel; just about anyone else will see this exactly for what it is: monotonous, generic, and overlong. I know they're from the Ukraine, but that's not a free pass, sorry.