Band:	Titaan
Album:	Itima
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	April 2020

01. Itima

Titaan (spelled with an extra "a" so you know it's serious) is a one-man black metal project from Italy that sounds significantly more ostentatious than your average one-man band; its cavernous sound allows you to hear the ambition echoing through every corner as the single, 46-minute-long track unfolds.

Itima is as dark and imposing as the cover art, if not quite as monochromatic; when the metal is on full blast, Titaan's lone member, Lalartu, transforms into an abyssal force, but there's more to Itima than black metal (as well there should be if we want one person to keep playing for this long). Interrupting the thick layers of hard-driving black metal are a series of low-tempo, low-volume interludes; sometimes solo synths, sometimes acoustic guitar, sometimes vocal drones, and on at least one occasion (around the 16-minute mark) a mid-tempo passage that combines the best elements of the two registers. That part is probably the highlight of the album for me, as it demonstrates the medium between "all at once" and "hardly anything" that necessitates more creative writing.

The black metal passages have some serious urgency, due in part to the unguarded ferocity with which they are played and in part to what sounds like warning bells that keep the pace here and there. That breakneck speed and the typically short duration between caesurae meshes with certain riffs that depart from the typical evil black metal style; they're often disguised by the blastbeats and slobbering growls, which are absolutely dripping with as much saliva as reverb, but those particularly frenetic, repetitive, atonal riffs could well be grindcore. On the opposite end, especially early on there are some passages reminiscent of Gojira, made of heavily tapped riffs and runs of technical percussion. The drums are mostly blastbeats, tom fills, and cymbals, but now and then you'll hear more articulate techniques and a denser, more aggressive sound that edges into that groovy alt-death territory.

Itima doesn't break any boundaries of songwriting, although it feels grander and more ambitious than Kadingir on a moment-to-moment basis. It is commendably tight for a one-man band and it shows a capacity for being both more brutal and more atmospheric than straight black metal tends to be, thanks to the stacked tracks of instrumentation and the voluminous darkness in which it echoes. I'm not sure I buy the packaging or understand the intent thereof, however - one gigantic, 46-minute track sure looks impressive, but with how the quieter segments routinely break up the song and how different each new segment is, I have to wonder why Itima wasn't broken up into multiple tracks like Kadingir, which is otherwise virtually the same in its structure. I wouldn't even say that the song "evolves," which would justify such a formidable run time; it simply changes abruptly from passage to passage, creating an impression of different compositions stuck together.

Part of me says that the album might have worked better split into two EPs, one black metal and one drone; the constant reversal between the two modes over the course of 46 minutes can get tiresome. Yet I think both sides function best in relation to each other, with the quieter interludes particularly working better as counterweight than as compositions in their own right. Despite my skepticism of the format, though, I think Itima is an improvement over Kadingir and indicates the possibility of some more interesting takes on black metal to follow.