ALBUM REVIEW: The Blossoming – Ætheria Conscientia
Right from their very first pieces of of recorded output, France’s ÆTHERIA CONSCIENTIA have been producing music that not only embraces a more progressive take on black metal, but also has the potential to reshape it. Their first two albums, 2018’s Tales From Hydhradh and 2021’s Corrupted Pillars Of Vanity, showcased an adventurous and imaginative sound that drew broadly from various folk, jazz and even psychedelic forms of music to flavour their stunning and eclectic brand of black metal. The band’s third album, The Blossoming, is another masterclass in how to make genre-defying, dementedly grandiose extreme metal, and could very well be their finest record to date.
Astral Choir, with its interesting, melodious leads, intricate drums and bubbling bass hooks, has an incredibly warm and inviting sound, which immediately establishes the band’s avant-garde touches without going overboard, notably with writhing saxophone passages, creating brilliant hooks that are interwoven in a way that not only thickens things out, but also lends this an impressively layered sound as the music takes on a faster, harder approach. The vocals are the only element that are consistently coarse and intense, anchoring the song in black metal even when the music lurches in the complete opposite direction, making for an adventurous and expansive start to proceedings.
Haersperadh picks up seamlessly from the last track, but tackles the core of the music in a very different manner. The spacey ambience and echoing, muggy guitar tone push this firmly into realms that border on prog and post-rock, leaning into the hypnotic undercurrent that was central to the previous song, whilst still allowing for harsher elements to cut through this light and grandiose sound. The vocals, if anything, are shriller than before, counterpointing the slick quality of the key hooks and cavernous rhythms, with the sudden turn into doom adding an emotive weight to everything, all the way up to the searing, jarring final moments. Wrath Of The Virikoï – a shorter, punchier effort – offers perhaps the most straight forward and traditional piece of black metal on the whole album, with denser guitars, frenetic percussion and feral vocals aping a classic melodic black metal formula, with the outright inventiveness of the riffs, considered musicianship and progressive sections keeping things thoroughly engrossing, acknowledging the classic black metal tropes whilst brilliantly subverting them to craft something powerful and engrossing.
Daimu Kadasdra Ko Antall shifts away from the energetic, virtuosic sound of the album’s first half and adopts a measured, minimal sound that bears some resemblance to the dramatic undertones of Astral Choir, even bringing back the kind of angelic backing vocals that loomed larger in the climactic moments of that song and pushing the sound in a totally different direction that embraces elements of Middle Eastern folk music, prog and even hints of power metal, with the end result being one of the most distinctive songs on the whole album, and arguably one of its most cinematic. Endless Cycle continues in a similar vein, feeling like something by OM, and being so much better for it. The guitars and drums do gradually become fairly animated, creating a sharp and focused doom sound, which quickly gives way to some incredibly visceral and dissonant black metal which veers drastically away from the murky sound that it began on, ducking and weaving between these two equally epic extremes. There are experimental parts peppered liberally throughout, in particular some great, dancing sax lines, which play a prominent role in this song, complementing the music as opposed to distracting from it.
The Blossoming, like the album’s opener, is an ambitious and bombastic affair that covers a lot of ground musically, from the crystalline post-rock of its first motif through to the huge, noxious atmospheric black metal that strikes a balance between the lighter parts of the band’s sound and the underlying belligerence of earlier tracks, with the vocals taking on a nauseating and bellicose tone to match the dark and feral moments perfectly. This is another song that ebbs and flows from one style to the next with ease, cramming more ideas into nine minutes than some acts fit on entire records, making for an intriguing and immersive conclusion to a fantastic album.
There are very few bands and albums that successfully manage to expand upon a style that’s truly experimental and interesting that still fits comfortably into the established borders of black metal. This is one of those exceptions; what ÆTHERIA CONSCIENTIA have produced, not just on The Blossoming, but on their earlier work as well, is an excellent template for how to craft modern avant-garde black metal. There are lots of elements at play in the undercurrent of this record, from Middle Eastern folk music to space rock and free-form jazz, and more importantly the band incorporate them into this album’s sound without making them feel as though they have been shoehorned in to create the illusion of musical progression, instead complementing to and serving the style and sound as a whole. It’s yet another musical triumph, and certainly not the last for this exceptionally imaginative and expansive outfit.
Rating: 9/10
The Blossoming is out now via Frozen Records.
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