Australian Black Metal band CLARET ASH combined their latest 2 musical contributions ("The Great Adjudication: Fragment One" and "The Great Adjudication: Fragment Two") into one big 75-minute album LP. At first, I thought it was a compilation of the best tracks of the two (since it's categorized as a compilation album) but I realized later that this is basically the two records in one, a double album, if you will. You could say that this is a massive project, I would prefer calling it a cash grab or an economically appealing edition, but each to their own, I guess. It shouldn't really matter anyways honestly, because spending money on this is a huge waste. The record is a long (As in long, I mean REALLY long) effort of... Well, throughout my listens, I couldn't grasp what the concept or intent of the group was wuth this album. To me, it felt like a prime example of purposelessness. And needless to say, 75 minutes of purposelessness is a very long time. Okay, let's be a bit more fair, since it has its (few) highlights, let's just say 70 minutes, okay? Do I sound like less of an asshole now? Good.

The points where the band managed to capture my interest for a short period of time were some sections with a bit of a choir feel to the clean vocals (first part of "Devolution", "The Gyre") and the repeating guitar leads in "Like Tears In Rain". Aside from these moments, the whole record comes off as generic and void of artistic effort. It also manages to blend perfectly together as one musical unit in a way that it doesn't become cohesive at all. It's incredible. There were also some aspects where I thought „that was a neat idea with great potential, but it was poorly executed", for example the piano intro of the title-track (which kind of reminded me of the Dark Souls soundtrack) which leads into the build-up of the traditional Black Metal part of the song, it's kind of good, I liked the subtle construction of sounds, until it was ruined by rushing it into the kvltness. Another "wasted potential" thing was in "Vicissitude", where they tried a hook of some kind, but just like the rest of it, in the end it was meh. Verdict: It's not good.