From the annals of some such or other comes a rarely heard of Black Metal band RINGARË. Almost like a lost artifact from the depths of some long-forgotten abandoned house or an underwater cavern comes a lo-fi, dissonant, potato-recorded sound that feels strangely intimate. Deeply so for all the album's harsh, spike-ridden chords and basslines turning to vapor before your eyes. Channeling some GHOST BATH and a bit of HARIKIRI FOR THE SKY, RINGARË (Tolkien's elvish word for "cold-day" or "last month of the year") is lonesome and devoid of any source of joy. Under Pale Moon is four separate wastelands of unending sorrow.

RINGARË's origins are almost as mysterious as the music itself. With so few places to find them online, it's safe to call them 'underground'. Created out of love for the synth modified Black Metal of the 90s, RINGARË revives an interesting splinter genre well. Their debut EP Under Pale Moon focuses on gauzy, far away noise with only a few piano notes or drawn out violin strings sprinkled through in the middle ground just to add some unexpected depth, some of which can be found in "Sorrow Under Starry Sky" and the reflective "Through Forest and Fog". As the album is so vaporous in nature, there are few other grounding points to help keep your bearings while listening. Even the drums are too far off in the background to consider them adequate waypoints.

You can try to forge a path with only the bass notes to guide you, but you are mostly on your own trying to find any path out from these lands of dream-like unfamiliarity. RINGARË's focus on the more ambient applications of Black Metal serves them well, however they risk the vocals getting lost or assimilated in all that instrumental fog. The lyrics are the desperate screams of a drowning man lost in a sea of cacophonous tar. The instrumentals are lush rainforests of emotional dissonance. Under Pale Moon is beautiful sadness.