tree – MSLi 69 (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

After “exordium” leads us in with what sounds like a cross between a broken signal drifting in from deep space and a distant banshee wail, “hollow” then kicks in as the first song proper. But it is this track that immediately makes you realise that the mercurial opener was actually more representative of the album than you might have realised at the time. The beats might be more structured, the guitars more consistent, but as the vocals gibber and gnash like an insane person, the tracks do not feel that far apart sonically.

So, this is going to be an album built on the odd and the extreme. Nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. “lair” explores the deep, the dark, and the terrifying, music made in the gothic darkness, fractured and fraught, proving that less, allowing atmosphere and imagination to do the work, can often be more intense and startling than the squalling sonics that opened the album up.

“forlorness” feels like horror-folk, a cinematic soundtrack to a film that explores dark mythologies and Lovecraftian visions of madness, and “the dream within a dream within a dream” is suitably drifting and hallucinogenic, which makes “hidden,” which follows, the perfect jolt out of such lucid states as it comes crawling and clawing into the consciousness.

To write tree off as just another journey through the more extreme black metal realms would be to miss the point. This is all about dynamics and soundscaping, and whilst at one end of the spectrum it does head into the incendiary and intense, there is an equal amount of ambient creativity and atmospherics.

Of course, it is the interplay between the two that does the work, the sonic highs all the more impactful for the lingering lulls that lie between, and vice versa.