Black Wisdom

This is the second disc of noisy, ambitious Black Metal from this Russian band. With the dense lyrics and more poetic song titles, this is obviously a band influenced by more intellectual acts like Nightbringer or Deathspell Omega. This album kicks off well with a well-produced, heavy guitar sound and a lot of aggression. The sound is heavy and grabs your attention, the problem is the songs have almost no dramatic build or emotional through-line, so they just kind of hack away until they are over. Variations in sound never resolve into variations in tension, and as a result the whole thing remains kind of at a remove, and does not carry you away.