Metamorph

Spire

Ambient music and Black Metal go together like Varg Vikernes and Arson. For years, many […]
By Danny Sanderson
January 14, 2015
Spire - Metamorph album cover

Ambient music and Black Metal go together like Varg Vikernes and Arson. For years, many of the genre's greats, from the likes of BURZUM to 1349 have managed to pepper their discography with ambient flourishes, and after the turn of the century and the end of the second wave of Black Metal, many bands have sought to combine the two genres in their own music. Brisbane, Australia's SPIRE are an Ambient Black Metal band who have, in this EP, perhaps one of the best examples of how this particular strain of the Black Metal smorgasbord should be approached. Whereas many bands stick to Black Metal with little Ambient pieces to break up the monotony of their songs. However, this band incorporates both into the songs simultaneously, and, as I'm about to illustrate, it works very well.

The opening track, which is untitled, is a very ambient piece of music with a very eerie air about it. The first full song on the record, "Zygote", is a very slow, creepy sounding piece of Black Metal. The vocals are more of a necrotic croak than the traditional bestial rasp that most bands go for, and in this case, the vocals complement the music very well. The song which follows it, "Larva", is quite a bit faster, and has a dissonance and rage about it that makes it genuinely dark and foreboding. Each track on this EP is broken up by short pieces of ambient music which, although they aren't songs in their own right, are integral to making this record flow smoothly from song to song. "Paturience" is a straight forward Black Metal song; the guitar lines create a great atmosphere throughout the whole track. The last and longest song on this album is "Mort", is a cacophony of raw, Black Metal fury, and is pretty unrelenting all the way through. Like all the other songs, it maintains an air of ambient music under the barrage of the Black Metal which works very well.

Overall, this is a pretty good EP, although there isn't much that differentiates it from many other Ambient Black Metal releases. It has a fantastic atmosphere, and balances the raw Black Metal sound with the eerie and enchanting Ambient music. I'd check this band out at least once, because there are a lot of aspects to their sound that will be sure to draw people from the more extreme end of the Black Metal genre in.

7 / 10

Good

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"Metamorph" Track-listing:

1. ...
2. Zygote
3. Larva
4. Paturience
5. Mort

Spire Lineup:

Unknown

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