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ASTAROT  As Leaves Fall  CD   (Satanath)   11.98


��One of the few Mexican black metal albums that's come into C-Blast lately, Astarot's As Leaves Fall offers a solitary sound that brings together gorgeous, mysterious ambient synthesizer music, searing raw black metal, and some elements of ethereal darkwave into a somber, slightly off-kilter sound. It's some pretty isolationist stuff, music for people who spend a lot of time hanging out by themselves in the woods, and it definitely feels like it was created by someone with the same kind of habits. I was actually first turned on to Astarot's raw ambient blackness after hearing 'em on WFMU's My Castle Of Quiet, where they were spinning a few tracks off of this then-unreleased album earlier in 2013; the gloomy, shadowy sounds that drifted off of that show ended up only hinting at the odd, bewitching quality that flickers throughout these nine tracks.

�� Working here as a duo with vocalist Tortured, Astarot shifts between those ambient environmental soundscapes and passages of raw, tortured black metal, thick with the ambience of the ancient forests that surround Irapuato, Mexico. The album opens up into a verdant soundscape of woodland noises and birdsong, droning mournful keyboards breaking through this sylvan ambience like rays of light breaking through the forest canopy, warbling sheets of synth-strings drifting through the woodland shadows. Beautiful stuff, even when Astarot finally creeps in with his demonic screeching vocals, a hateful reptilian shriek that echoes off in the background. When the second song "Chapter II - Nacer, Perecer y Renacer" drifts in, the sound becomes more peculiar, the sound of heavy, driving double bass rumbling in the background, switching off with slower, sparser slowcore-like tempos, but the guitars are absent at first, replaced with those droning keyboards; it's not until a little later on the album that the blackened tremolo riffs begin to appear, dissolving into the background over those distant reverb-drenched drums. There's a strange distant quality to the recording, as if we're hearing the band performing this from somewhere off in the woods, and Tortured's anguished, abject shrieks sound lost amid the album's strange, spacious sound, forlorn cries drifting off into the background. The black metal passages at times remind me of the raw, synth-drenched wilderness visions of Marblebog, but these are often just brief bursts of aggression scattered among the album's many sprawling atmospheric dirges led by those dreamy keyboards. As the album continues, washes of gorgeous bleary Tangerine Dream-esque synth unfold over the slow, spacious drumming, while other tracks are little more than a lone electric guitar weaving a slow, doleful melody around those forest sounds, sending out waves of tremulous arpeggios into the gloom. If it weren't for those anguished shrieking black metal vocals, the music on tracks like "Walking in the Forest of Time, the Eternal Forest" and "Despair" would actually sound a lot more like something from gloom rockers Lycia or early Love Spirals Downward, but with those undercurrents of double bass surging into view beneath the floating keys and dark dreamy atmosphere, it becomes something else entirely. And other songs like "Revelation of the Storm" are almost akin to the murky ambience of Vinterriket transplanted to ancient Mexican forests, funereal synth-strings hovering mournfully over the pounding distant drums and washes of grim, grainy sonic drift.


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