3 out of 5

Label: self-released

Produced by: ?

An astounding work of cross-genre extremes, Alder Glade’s two-track Lunar Majesty can’t quite perfect the mix – staying perhaps too close to black metal flatness – to best effect those extremes.

AG’s originality within the metal genre has been evident from the start, their compositions – lyrically, musically – feeling just a bit more literate and dense; if black metal is often about mood, Alder Glade added a further layer of emotionality to that, allowing their tracks to hit on several levels at once.

It’s been expected and welcomed to see AG not be so slavish to BM ethos, then, and willing to step up the production game as needed to support their evolving style. And Lunar Majesty is an effective and gorgeous further extension of that, blending post-rock ambient metal – a la Red Sparowes – with shoegaze walls of guitar and percussion.

But: while not slavish to the lo-fi caverns of black metal’s sound, Glade still is black metal, and while that gives the tracks an awesome, reverberating despair (and helps to blend the vocals with the brash guitars in a particularly satisfying way), a lot of the extra layering AG puts into these songs gets… lost. I mean, not, because you hear it, but it ends up not adding as much depth as it could, all mixed to a relative flatness, and also treated with that same reverb. In part, it’s admittedly mesmerizing – nothing takes you out of the sound, and I can listen to this thing on repeat for days – but also, when each track builds to a conclusion of intense drumming and dueling guitars and synths, you’re kind of left wondering where all that sound is going.

This is an amazing black metal release; an amazing post-metal release. While the former shapes the latter for A.G., perhaps the next evolutions lets even more slack into that black metal tag.