A War For Wonder comes drifting out of the lush green woodlands of Cascadia, the creation of Echtra, one of the members of the scathing black metal duo Fauna. Here, Echtra eschews the furious extended black metal epics of Fauna for a much more blissful and atmopsheric experience, offering up two twenty-three minutes tracks that stretch out across vast fields of boiling double-bass and distant blackened buzz, but although the music is dark and brooding, it's also quite gorgeous, focusing on dreamy melodies layered over a minimal framework of drums and muted shoegazey guitars. Both tracks follow a similiar path - blurred distorted guitars and raging hyperfast blastbeats are pushed to the background, creating a seething but lush backdrop that Echtra layers with beautiful dreampop guitars and delicate acoustic melodies, contrasting the Creation Records style prettiness against the muted Ulver-esque buzz churning behind it. The sound here is reminiscent of some other likeminded bands that mix 80's dreampop sounds with black metal, Caina for one, Alcest too, and while fans of both of those bands will no doubt completely fall in love with Echtra's sound, this is at the same time much more epic, imbued with a greater sense of grandeur than either of those bands due to both the immense song lengths and the way that the melodies slowly evolve over the course of the song. The drums and buzzing backdrop of guitars are dense and furious, but there's no fury here, just a dreamy meditative beauty that seems to go on forever. It kind of falls somewhere in between the epic ambient blackmetalscapes of Wolves In the Throne Room and the gorgeous melodies of Alcest without really sounding like either. Definitely recommended, though. The disc comes in a four panel gatefold, embossed with strange symbols and printed with mystical quotes from Lao Tzu, Annie Dillard, and others.