The first thing which strikes you about the latest release from Lethean is the sound, on "The Waters Of Death" they deliver a very full, well constructed album. A wall of guitars opens the album on "Idylls Of The King" which twists and turns through tempos and key changes for a minute-and-a-half before the vocals of Thumri Paavana arrive, while at the same time she is galvanizing this extremely intense soundscape.

This is a very impressive offering by the UK based-duo which is revealed throughout the albums six-tracks, this is not a short album by any means, it clocks-in at just over forty-two minutes with the average length of a track at seven-minutes, a clever technique in allowing individual songs to breathe giving them depth and scope similar to a progressive-rock album, which is not too far from what we have here, the basis is a conceptual story involving time, decay and the journey of life itself, with which they have added artwork by Stefan Bleyl that is incredible in its own right.

What James Ashbey has done here, with one foot firmly in the past, is update the format and style of metal-music, giving it a new lease of life without pointing to any direct source of inspiration. This multi-instrumentalist plays guitars, drums and bass on this album, amazingly none of these areas suffer, instead Ashbey's clear vision is fully realized as all instruments are under his control.

He does however have a knack of keeping things very simple, loud and steady as opposed to over-complicated, it's on this canvas that Paavana can sculpt angelic-lines without exertion, this is an intelligent use of sound itself, how it is created and how it comes across to the listener. "In Darkness Veiled" is beautiful, a life- preserver of gentle electric guitar playing in the storm that surrounds it before it changes direction also into a furious pace, making it harder to believe that it is not a full band but only one man.

The riff-soaked "Time And Gods" has a quality of Black Sabbath to it, until the vocals of course, in a complete contrast "Across Grey Waters" opens to the sound of songbirds as a very low, underwater-guitar begins to slowly come to the surface, musically not the albums best track, but vocally it is sensational.

At the albums closer we have the mammoth "Devouring Fire", opening with a rushing wind and cracking fire as it launches into a genre-transcending guitar-riff, halting the surge of noise for the vocal above a subtle pattern, involving into a chugging pattern of noise, exceptional production lends to the weight of every song but here it has an extraordinary impact.  We are brought back into the fires with choral effects on the vocals and a phenomenal climax to an outstanding album.

Lethean have delivered a breathtaking album, hard to categorize in the metal-genre, it simply takes elements of them all and stitches them together to create a varied sound unlike many found in the UK at present, as two people only making music together for over a year we can look forward to more leaps of technical-brilliance.