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FELGRAVE “Otherlike Darknesses”
FELGRAVE “Otherlike Darknesses”
By Dr. Abner Mality
Ooo-wee, got a wild one here! FELGRAVE is basically a guy named M.L. Jupe from Norway, who handles everything except drums, which are manned by Robin Stone from the whacky likes of EVILYN and NORSE. When I saw there were just three songs here, I knew my work was cut out for me, but this was even tougher to get through than I thought.
This is one of those “everything but the kitchen sink” bands that throws a ton of styles at you...extreme dissonant blasting, bone-cracking doom, noodly post metal and atmospheric black metal. The audience for this kind of mish-mash is pretty restricted and I must admit I’m not the target for what FELGRAVE is dishing out. That being said, there are certainly jaw-dropping moments here and if you are into really avant-garde extreme metal ranging from ULCERATE to GIGAN to CULT OF LUNA and even LEPROUS, then you might just be over the moon with FELGRAVE.
“Winds Batter My Keep” opens with what sounds like a bag of hammers in a concrete mixer, just utter dissonant noise with cyclonic drumming and harsh screams. It eventually morphs into ultra-heavy gravity blasts and then quiet and somber post-metal meditations. The insane screams become pensive clean singing and you will get whiplash trying to reconcile it with what came before. Needless to say, things work their way up to the extreme again, but with more of a jangly black metal take. This track will really challenge you and there’s no compromise to it.
“Pale Flowers Under An Empty Sky” sounds like it might be some weepy emo-black ala ALCEST or maybe an ironic burst of ferocious noise. Sure enough, you get a bit of both in this 12 and a half minute colossus...which happens to be the shortest track on offer. The album wraps up with the behemoth title track and strangely enough, this wound up being my favorite. It’s got a lot of harsh blackness and emotional post-metal in its DNA, but it hangs together better than the previous cuts and gives more of an impression of being an actual song instead of a collection of wildly different parts. There’s also some effective use of melody.
In the end, FELGRAVE is not really the thing for me and I probably won’t return to this, but if you’re not put off by what I’ve described, you might just be up to the challenge here.
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