For an off topic question, I still wonder why the members of MORAST go by single letter shortenings of their names when their full names are easy to find information on a number of websites, it seems a bit pointless besides remaining anonymous to those who don't care to discover their real names. Yet back to the topic at hand, today I get to present MORAST and their first full length studio release Ancestral Void. Bringing their own style self-described as a fusion of doom and death metal, though admittedly having a fair few sounds reminiscent of black metal, the album is rather short at only 6 tracks and taking a little less than 35 and a half minutes. With all this in mind there is a very large degree of uncertainty as to what awaits, and as to quell that let us dive right in.

The album opens with "Crescent", which immediately opens with a sludge like doom intensive riff. As soon as the vocals begin one begins to more closely imagine black metal influences than that of death metal. Admittedly, the song rigid and unchanging for its first half. Even when it changes tone it barely deviates. It waits till more than ⅗ of the way through the song for interesting guitar usage to take place, and it is the same riff that is repeated here and there with gaps of monotony again, just to end abruptly and uninterestingly. This song really does not create a hopeful opening for the album. "Forlorn" certainly does not help to quell these fears as it falls into a similar rut of lack of variance or deviation. This is less of a problem in the namesake of the album "Ancestral Void" when it first opens, yet for a long duration of the song it falls back into this rut of repetition of the same riff. It feels as if there are at most 3 different riffs in the song that are all 4 to 7 notes each. This is really a problem in every song admittedly. It feels as if each song has 1 or 2 major riffs and the entire song is built around them.

It is here I will close really. MORAST really follows in the vein of the more recent rise of a "discordant" sound in metal, one I will openly admit I am not a huge fan of. Yet this is not the problem with the album. It is the very rigid lack of deviance from any given riff. It feels as if each song is a single stretch of five seconds put on continuous repeat. Being such, I cannot recommend this album to anyone if I am painfully honest.