Artist: Gravfrost
Title: My Heart Bleeds Into Black Abyss
Type: Album
Label: Digital
Music can be cathartic, the pressure valve opened just far enough for the rage or the horror to subside to manageable levels for artist and listener. Sometimes though it can be simple expression of the feelings in the most human or primal of ways and, for listeners that may indeed help. I have often named one album in pqarticular, Katatonia’s ‘Discouraged Ones’ as an album that helped me in my truly darkest period because I didn’t want to be alone, but could not bear the thought of people around me and that album made me feel heard, understood, and lent me a little strength too. But I have no idea what if did for the artist.
Where the return album of Gravfrost lies in this I am still unsure. It opens as it means to go on; a low, wintery dirge. Footsteps crunch through snow, briefly and then the feel of wind seeps away and we are inside.
But inside what, where?
‘Lament For The Slain’. It is a truly dark place. Subterranean, isolated and as the raw wash of sound rises, jittering with distortion and fuzz, that sense of isolation increases. The melody when it arrives, unbidden, is disturbingly epic and devastatingly grim all at once. It is ponderous, bleak and unforgiving and yet it goes on, and on. It feels like footsteps, old ones fading with time but still somehow determined to go on, to offer something to those slain. Remembrance. And with that there comes a low, flickering glow of beauty, somehow.
‘A Soul Cast Into The Abyss’ offers a deeper world. Notes softly echoing in a still, empty darkness. The raw synth sounds rise again, the rhythm that funereal pacing that offers no way out and no hope. The song reeks of lonliness, somehow. The melody winding and reaching upwards for contact and endlessly, furitless searching for it and finding only failure. There is a moment of not hope, but somehow I feel acceptance as the music becomes a simple, low lit melody and when the steps come once more it has a different tone . An empty, endless walk into the never ending darkness.
And interlude then, ‘Beyond The Light, Before The Void’. A moment of strange and cosmic murmuring. Notes echoe like light returning a glow from some contact, some approach… and ‘Hollow, Restless I Roam’ flows from its shadow. Honestly that title is just so perfect; there is a restless soul to the music, the arrangement of the distorted synths and the cleaner melodic veins creating a strange almost undertow that ebbs and flows with the solid drum beat steps. It has a sense of travel but no sense of purpose other than onwards. It cloaks me in dusty cloth and darkness and moves further into a darkness that slowly eats at your soul. Bereft of goals, of a tale that can be recalled, this presence simply has become an endless motion. ‘Eulogy’ echoes the previous track with a distinct layer woven in that almost sets me apart, more a spectator to the presence and its endless, silent journey. A tableau commenting upon what I have seen with a mournful melody but a sense of grace that the observer can see even if the lost soul can not. It is tragic, heartfelt and quite moving…
‘My Spirit Will Never Know Peace’ closes the experience with soft, echoing clestial notes so sad that it reaches into your heart, placing them there and leaving that faint, failing glow within. An echo of what you have seen, the remembrance of a soul passing you by forever.
It is a difficult album to absorb but if you can it becomes not simply despair but that strange, dark and intangible spark of beauty within. In style I am reminded of old, old projects like Exiled From Light and also the strange eerie world or Norrt, but this also walks just along the borders of the darkest dungeon synth too. There is a distand glitter of the celestial, the oppressive weight of the subterranean and always the lost, empty sounds of footsteps peristing on their journey.
You may lose yourself inside this place. There is horror and despair but also those moments of light, dim and distant and hazy, that can also offer a weird, brief haven. But whatever, this is just a dark, dusty jewel waiting for your discovery.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 