Hecate Enthroned never really understood the idea of “less is more”, and thankfully this album doesn’t try to change that. “The Corpse Of A Titan, A Lament Long Buried” goes straight into huge keyboards, cold melodies, blastbeats, dramatic transitions and all the old symphonic black metal stuff people either still love or got tired of twenty years ago.
Personally, I’m glad they didn’t try to modernize it too much.
A lot of newer bands playing this kind of music end up sounding weirdly safe. Everything is polished to death, every “epic” moment feels calculated, and after twenty minutes you barely remember anything except the production. Hecate Enthroned avoids most of that problem here because the album still feels rough enough underneath all the atmosphere. The guitars still scrape a bit, the faster parts still sound properly aggressive, and the whole thing feels more alive than overplanned.
The old-school symphonic black metal influence is obvious immediately, but the album doesn’t come across like some desperate nostalgia trip either. It honestly sounds more like a band still enjoying this style instead of trying to recreate an old photo album.
“Spirits Stir Within Our Ancestors Tombs” is one of the stronger tracks because it doesn’t rush into full speed immediately. It kind of crawls forward at first, builds slowly, then opens up into those big melodic sections without forcing the transition too hard. “Deathless In The Dryad Glade” does something similar in a different way. The opening almost feels funeral-doom slow before the blasting sections finally arrive later.
That slower pacing helps the album a lot because when Hecate Enthroned go full symphonic attack nonstop, things can start blurring together a little. There are definitely moments where the atmosphere carries more weight than the actual riffs do. “The Boreal Monastery” is probably the clearest example. It’s not bad, it just feels like the song keeps circling the same mood longer than it really needs to.
Still, the record usually knows when to shift gears before it gets completely stuck. A lead line suddenly cuts through, the vocals get nastier again, or the keyboards pull things somewhere colder for a while. Little changes, but enough to stop the album from turning into one giant wall of background atmosphere.
And honestly, the biggest reason the album works is probably conviction. Hecate Enthroned sound completely committed to this kind of oversized, dramatic symphonic black metal. No ironic distance, no stripped-back “grown-up” version of the genre, no pretending they’re above the theatrical side of it now.
Sure, it drags in places. Sure, a couple songs could lose some length. But compared to a lot of modern symphonic black metal records that feel assembled inside software before anybody even writes a memorable section, this actually feels like a band playing music they genuinely still care about.
That already puts it ahead of most of the competition.
http://www.facebook.com/hecateenthroned
Thanks to Grand Sounds PR.
