Supernal is always a great source for awesome outsider black metal, and this 2005 release from the UK band Ashes is right up there alongside labelmates Benighted Leams, Dead Raven Choir, Drudkh, and Contra Ignem Fatuum in terms of twisted, highly personal BM strangeness. Another loner Black Metal outfit, Ashes is the work of one Davidian (a.k.a. David Lumsden), and Hymn To A Grey Sky was Ashes' debut full length following a pair of demos. The album is composed of eight "chapters" with titles like "Leaf Lord" and "I, The Forest" that are tracked together as a single 47 minute piece. Working with a hybrid of woodland ambience, field recordings, and stumbling black metal, the music could be comparable to a fuzzier, dronier Benighted Leams, the sort of shambling, fucked up midpaced mutant black metal that Supernal specializes in so well; the 47 minutes of Hymn... wind through open fields of fast, buzzing black metal and spastic mid-tempo lurch with fucked up offtime drum machine programming and stumbling blastbeats, haunting, wobbly synth ambience and distant carnival keyboards buried deep in the mix, strange and melancholy acoustic guitars, dreamy drone interludes, and intensely creepy, cackling vocals that sounds more like the gurgling of a slit throat than any sort of intelligible speech, all of this cloaked in a grim, grey wash of gauzy ambience. Then, in the middle of the album, there's this huge stretch of natural ambience that opens up, the sound of the forest with running water, birdsong, leaves rustling in the wind, a really evocative field recording of woodland life that lasts for something like 15 minutes before it erupts into another melancholy, fuzz-blasted midtempo dirge that drifts into a weird gloomy outro with classical guitars, tambourines, heavy tympani drumming, and swells of synth melody. It feels like Ashes explores similiar sylvan glades as the seemingly likeminded projects Celestiial and Svart Ugle, and this album turns out to contain a surprising balance between grave distortion inferno and woodland tranquility.