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Graveland - The Celtic Winter
Review: The further perfection of the Graveland style of battle metal, The Celtic Winter emerges from fusion of romantic melody and raw black metal in the context of waltzlike, dreamtime music with classical aspirations delivered in microambient doses through its complexity of barren minimalist structure. Fundamental intensity in this music derives from the tension between its melodic progression and its violent, half-dancelike war-step rhythm.
Under roaming organ chords slicing riffs introduce structure and the more unsettling nihilistic melodic motions within codex of possibilities to each song, a structure not unlike the wandering melodies of Emperor that form the spinal foundation of their epic songs. Elemental variations distinguish iterations of idea and hint at where it will attempt to lead; the narrative style similar to this is avoided through fascist tendencies toward repetition of larger structures in order to preserve a simple but unifying melodic coherence. In classic style for this geographical subgenre the vocals are back-of-room distorted shrieks that work less as lead rhythm than as continuance, leading each cycle through a seasonal progression toward death.
Menacing and distorted figures underlie these calmly beautiful riffs; despite the use of strumming as tremelo sustain and consequent lack of distinctive notes in the flow, the handful of notes chosen for each piece represent Burzum-style a sequence of themes and pattern tendencies which describe the poetic world and internal balance of every piece. Beyond the aesthetic fakers who throw folk instruments and scales over droning minor key rock, Graveland have resurrected from past structures and thematic protocols for complex yet simple and atonal compositions, and from that have shown a progression of archaic lawlessness toward the philosophies of future in a collective intellectual space as diffuse, threatening and obscure as the dark music of this ominous voice.