From Bandcamp, “After dropping a well-received death/doom album five years back, FELGRAVE has crafted an ingenious album melding influences of doom, black and death metal in a way rarely done before. The one-man band has broken the mold and the music on this album flows in an intuitive, undulating, almost whimsical manner, touching upon several styles and effortlessly shape shifting through them all. The songs are between 12 to 18 minutes long and each one seems to tell a tale of its own. There is so much going on in each song that it demands repeated listens which isn't necessarily arduous because of the smooth transitions and the overall coherency.”

The album has three long songs. “Winds Batter My Keep” is first, and it’s an 18-minute beast. It opens with incredibly low and slow tones, some harrowing elements in the background, and a good deal of dissonance. It makes me seem that I am feeling around in the dark. First, I find the ground, then some things to grab a hold of, as the song begins to take shape. There are deep gutturals, and even some cleans, but much of the landscape seems uneasy, even chaotic. The dissonance hangs around like a thick fog. “Pale Flowers Under an Empty Sky” is a bit shorter, at 12-minutes long. More chaos and dissonance pours in early, with a flurry of drums, guitars, bass, and harsh vocals. It almost seems like the wheels are about to fly off the speeding bus, but somehow, they hang on.

“Otherlike Darknesses” closes the three-song album, and it’s another 18-minute opus, riddled with dissension and conflict. Sometimes it slows enough for the harrowing elements to reach out and grab you with an icy grip, but other times, the dissonance rings steadily in your ears. The clean passages are hard to connect with the harsh ones. “Smooth transitions and overall coherency” aren’t two things that I readily hear in the album. Some of the transitions are sharp, and the songs are put in a blender at times, shaken, mixed up, even intermixed. Still, the album was interesting to me, because it was an out-of-the-box style. Give the album a spin for yourself and see what secrets it might unlock.