Fen - Dustwalker
I love it when bands take my advice. HA! Okay… in all seriousness, I don’t honestly have delusions of such grandeur, but if you recall my write-up on Epoch two years ago, you know that I proposed, in praise of the LP’s best track “Half-Light Eternal,” that “…the lighter, more mellow side of Fen… might just be the right direction for them to go in.” Well, I got my wish in the form of this UK outfit’s third full-length effort, and Dustwalker is all the better for it. That’s not to say they’ve trimmed all of the Black Metal aspects from their sound. On the contrary, opener “Consequence” sets the stage with embittered Blackened rage, while nearly all ten minutes of the aptly titled “The Black Sound” sizzle with slow-to-mid-tempo gloomy grimness. But the band’s somber, desolate, Post-Rock underpinnings are most responsible for what is remembered and ultimately what will bring the listener back for more. It’s the hopeless beauty of clean-vocal-dominated tracks like the epic-length “Hands of Dust,” with its suspended animation Shoegaze and slow-motion blizzard of wistful melodies, and “Spectre,” featuring an acoustic Alt-Rock sensibility that wouldn’t sound entirely out of place on a Fleet Foxes record, that truly steal the show. Again, these songs and others owe at least a little something to the euphoric feel of the ethereal “Half-Light Eternal.” Another Epoch carry-over is the grainy, unpolished, live-sounding production. While its organic nature does serve to complement the earthy concept and atmosphere of Dustwalker, I can’t help but wonder what magic a cleaner, bigger sound might reveal when it comes to all-pro songwriting of this caliber. For instance, Alcest certainly don’t use a shoebox and a series of extracted incandescent light bulb filaments to record their albums, and I think those results speak for themselves. My only other gripe —besides the Special Edition bonus track being an instrumental outro… cool, thanks— is the occasional awkward shouting or yelping. That shit ruins the moment worse than a whistling snot during a French kiss. Angry-in-traffic-meets-burn-victim yelling has absolutely no place whatsoever in music this graceful. It’s a small hindrance that can be overlooked, but big enough to keep this from total perfection. While the 2009 debut LP The Malediction Fields remains my personal Fen fave, Dustwalker easily takes the Silver.
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