VALDRIN - Throne of the Lunar Soul - 2LP White Vinyl DLP
BBV Direct Import, Blood Harvest, Sweden. It's finally here again, and in color! This has been on so many AOTY lists.
No longer one of the metal underground’s best-kept secrets, VALDRIN began picking up momentum with the 2018 BLOOD HARVEST release of their second album, Two Carrion Talismans – epic, shapeshifting blackened death that was both timeless and fresh – and then eclipsed that achievement two years later with third album Effigy of Nightmares, also released by BLOOD HARVEST, whereby the band dove deeply into the bluish purple depths of ’90s melodic black metal. To hear comparisons to Vinterland, Sacramentum, and Sweden’s Dawn wasn’t mere hyperbole; it was assertive truth, as commanding as VALDRIN’s songwriting mastery. Which is to say nothing of the band’s ongoing Ausadjur Mythos, a fantastical tale begun with their Beyond the Forest debut album and which forms the lyrical basis of all since.
Now, continuing that tale is VALDRIN’s most epic record yet: Throne of the Lunar Soul. At 11 songs in 74 minutes, LP#4 is truly a “double album” in the old-school sense – no fat or extraneous wank, only labyrinthine songs threaded together in a manner most suiting to their Ausadjur Mythos. As founding vocalist/guitarist Carter Hicks explains, “Centuries after the cataclysmic events of Beyond the Forest, Valdrin returns to his homeland, Ausadjur, in a distant realm at the center of the multiverse. There, he awaits judgment for failing in his mission to quell an insurrection of evil in the Orcus underworld, which festered beneath the forlorn planet Earth. However, a strange aura of celebration permeates the air of Ausadjur upon the return of Valdrin and his newly recruited horde, and all does not seem well in the celestial kingdom of balance.”
Suitably, VALDRIN here nod to various points of their now-rich past while also pointing the way forward for ever-effervescent splendors that seem so authentically encased in 1997 that they sound impossibly fresher than anything around, “thawed” some 25 years later. With increased emphasis on dynamics as well as dramatic acoustic breaks & embellishments, the quartet leave no stone unturned in their arsenal, but each “stone” is crucial in its placement and serves a vivid purpose, such as the sometimes-subtle/sometimes-overt touch of mystical synth. Of course, VALDRIN can still race and rage with the best of any black and/or death metal band past or present, but even when the slipstreaming spires of sound threaten to become dizzying, the narrative of Throne of the Lunar Soul becomes that much deeper and more intense: not every story has a clear path, nor does it stay at the same pitch and meter. But rarely do stories ever get this grandiose and engaging. VALDRIN possess some strange (or at least elusive) magick, and in Throne of the Lunar Soul have they delivered a modern CLASSIC.
