April 20, 2013 • Pest Productions
I love hearing metal from outside of Europe and North America. There's usually some sort of regional influence seeping into the music that gives it a really cool cultural flair that's unique to that band. Unfortunately, I know nothing about traditional Indonesian music or even their culture in general, and Vallendusk isn't helping; while Black Clouds Gathering is a pretty good modern black metal album, there isn't much to it that really stands out.
The album is fairly typical post-2010 atmospheric black metal / blackgaze composition and aesthetics, with jangly distorted guitars, relentless double-kick and blastbeat drumming, generic but well-performed vocals, and lots of major-key riffs. It's the kind of thing that's been popular lately in the new black metal underground but Vallendusk does it relatively well. The music has a great feel to it, constantly driving forward, and the melodies are pleasant enough with the right amount of edge to fit the style.
Unfortunately, like many ambitious metal albums before it, Black Clouds Gathering tends to drag a bit. And it's an incredibly long album, too: at around 67 minutes, it's a bit more than my attention span can handle, especially when the band doesn't really do a lot to shake things up. It feels a bit like listening to the same exact song seven times in a row, which I have mixed feelings on—yes, it's a good song, but I'm going to get bored with it if you keep it up that long.
That being said, I would still recommend this to anyone else who's been following the trajectory of black metal over the last couple of years, as this is a good example of how good modern stuff can get. Yes, it's a bit disappointing that there wasn't any of that folk in it that I was promised, but I guess I can live with that. Maybe next time.
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