ALBUM REVIEW: Bellum I – Aquilus

The brainchild of Horace Rosenqvist, AQUILUS is a one-man atmospheric black metal project hailing from Australia. His first album, 2011’s Griseus, catapulted the band onto the stage with its blend of furious black metal and classical elements including piano, strings and interludes. Its vinyl release in 2013 further spread the word, and a follow-up has been hotly anticipated ever since. Finally, eight years later, the tree has borne fruit once again with second album Bellum I. Once more mixing atmospheric black metal with classical music, rather than broadening the sonic palette it instead refines what was a promising debut, tightening up song structures and using ambience in a far more controlled manner. 

Opening with The Night Winds Of Avila, that ambience is on full display to ease into the album as a soft piano sets the scene and strings build the piece throughout. Into Wooded Hollows soon shatters the peacefulness though, with vicious barked vocals, foreboding strings and battering drums soon to follow. It’s a slow, purposeful opening, full of menace and the unspoken fear of the unseen and unknown. Despite this, there are moments of forlorn beauty in the almost choral clean passages, and a riff that wouldn’t be out of place on a post-metal record which shifts the song into its second movement before it closes out in a classical piano-led passage. Eternal Unrest is the longest song on the album by some way and it’s only the second proper track; if it wasn’t so well written there’d be a real risk of exhaustion setting in early. Instead, it pits dissonant guitar lines against the melodious strings before the dissonance gives way to stirring leads. 

Bellum I follows this approach for the majority of its runtime; Moon Isabelline acts as a midway interlude with dramatic, cascading pianos that wouldn’t be too out of place at a recital. It helps to further the feeling that AQUILUS is attempting to merge the two worlds rather differently than before. Instead of the pomp of DIMMU BORGIR, for example, there’s a careful, somewhat restrained quality to the work that’s no less impactful. The Silent Passing, for instance, utilises piano and an acoustic guitar to open before discordant chords ring out and a serpentine riff enters. Along with Lucille’s Gate, it does come closest to embracing the fullness and bombast of symphonic black metal, but for the most part AQUILUS skirts the edge of it to far greater effect. 

The major criticism of Griseus was its length; at almost 80 minutes it was simply too long and unwieldy. While Bellum I does tighten things up and come in at a more reasonable 62 minutes, there’s still a fatigue that sets in, and the ambient interludes, though not as ubiquitous as before, do come perilously close despite the quality of the writing. This shouldn’t detract, though, from the fact that a decade after releasing such a highly-regarded debut, AQUILUS has managed to top that and produce a body of work that’s still sprawling and epic in scope but also successfully reins in some of the excesses of before. 

Rating: 7/10

Bellum I is set for release on December 3rd via Blood Music.

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