BLUT AUS NORD – ETHEREAL HORIZONS

(Andy Synn ventures towards new horizons with Blut Aus Nord, whose new album is out on Friday)

Although it often seems like we spend most of our time here at NCS playing catch-up… and that’s because we do… on rare occasions, such as this one, we do manage to get something published in advance of an album’s release.

Not necessarily by much, it’s true, but we’ll take what we can get when it comes to getting ahead of the curve for once.

Of course, few bands out there have as much of a claim to being “ahead of the curve” – not just once, but multiple times throughout the myriad variations of their sound – as Blut Aus Nord, whose long career has been characterised by a near-constant sense of musical motion and creative evolution.

Having spent the last several years engrossed in the horror and dread of the Lovecraft mythos – first with the maximalist auditory horror of Undreamable Abysses, (and its chilling companion, Lovecraftian Echoes), then with the even more otherworldly Nahab – it appears that it’s time, once again, for the band to shift shape and change direction once more.

In this case this means reverting – if that’s the right term – to the more spontaneous and shamelessly melodic approach of 2019’s fantastic Hallucinogen (still, arguably, the band’s best work of the last 10-15 years… which is saying something, considering how good their output has been during this period).

But whereas the latter album felt like an intensely introspective exploration and examination of the self, all psychotropic leads and mind-expanding melodies, the aptly-named Ethereal Horizons finds the band exploring a more celestial outlook, searching the skies and reaching towards something greater than themselves.

And while I must admit that there are aspects of the album where the band’s reach exceeds their grasp – parts of “The Ordeal” and “What Burns Now Listens”, in particular, find the trio drifting aimlessly in a dreamlike haze that’s more “soporific” than “hypnotic” – the high points here (outstanding opener “Shadows Breathe First”, mid-album highlight “The Fall Opens the Sky”, and epic, almost twelve-and-a-half minute closer “The End Becomes Grace”) are more than worth the time and attention it takes to fully appreciate them.

The aforementioned “Shadows Breathe First”, for example, is just over seven minutes of majestic, multi-layered guitars and shimmering atmospheric auroras propelled by a series of electrifying percussive patterns, all intertwined with a compelling combination of scorching snarls and captivating cleans (the latter of which, in my opinion, serve as one of the record’s finest, and most defining, features), while the stunning, almost spiritual, sounds of “The Fall Opens the Sky” add an even more progressive and cinematic sensibility to the band’s increasingly “Post-” Black Metal sound.

It would, of course, have been very easy – a little too easy, if we’re being totally honest – to simply declare the band’s new album a “masterpiece”, slap a 10/10 score on it, and settle in to receive all the resultant attention and acclaim that inevitably comes from praising one of the Black Metal scene’s most seminal and influential acts… and if every track was as good as “The End Becomes Grace”, whose mesmerising mix of soaring grandeur and soothing ambience somehow distorts your sense of both space and time as it spins and spirals off into the ether, that’s exactly what I’d be doing.

But, truth be told, Ethereal Horizons occasionally flies a little too close to the sun (or, at least, some other, similar celestial body) and loses its way in the blinding glare… meaning that I can’t, in good conscience, lavish it with the unconditional adulation I was hoping to.

And yet… let’s be clear about something… an album that is merely “very good” by Blut Aus Nord‘s standards would, for many other bands, be the crowning achievement of their career, and there are undeniably more than enough moments of pure musical magic here to suggest that Ethereal Horizons is simply the first, ambitious step on the next stage of the band’s journey.