Band:	Aosoth
Album:	IV: An Arrow In Heart
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	April 2013

01. An Arrow In Heart
02. One With The Prince With A Thousand Enemies
03. Temple Of Knowledge
04. Under The Nails And Fingertips
05. Broken Dialogue 1
06. Broken Dialogue 2
07. Ritual Marks Of Penitence

When it comes to making metal that conjures feelings of being perched on a cliff, gesticulating to control storms and Dothraki hordes and the like, titty-glittered Herman Li-like melodiousness is, mercifully, not the only kind of thing that can be made use of. Sometimes dissonance--sweet, sweet, sour dissonance--can do the trick nicely.

Aosoth prove that's the case on this, even though IV never feels so cheap (and badass) as to suggest that bringing listeners to that cliff perch was ever the goal. If cliffs were involved at all in their vision, they were there to suicide off of. Aosoth is just deep like that, I guess. In the little press blurb for this, they're quoted thusly: "[IV's] tracks still haunt us, as delivering them was a painful and excruciating experience, and left some of us even physically wounded..." The goal here was to be "spiritual," ostensibly from a melancholy place.

If, like me, "spiritual" entails imagining you're controlling a Dothraki army from a cliff perch though, then Aostoth succeeded for the most part. If it doesn't, then most of this thing probably won't bring on the irrational shudders, shivers, and sad thoughts. The epicness and fairly simple pounding force of the riffs on IV don't make me feel like I need to hide away in a cabin, hate company and eat my pets like a lot of black metal does, it summons more the feelings of power than misanthropy, loneliness and the like.

Part of that comes down to the death metal-like weight on most of this. IV isn't a straight up, through-and-through, truekvltfjord black metal album by any means. Its blackenedness may occasionally bring on the lonely feels, but the deathiness is always there to pimpslap some piss and vinegar back into the mix. IV is diverse like that; it isn't dominated by one style or one mood.

That said, despite utilizing dissonance constantly, their approach, particularly rhythmically, is straight forward and cleanly produced for the most part--they don't fuck around much with pace changes and attempting to create a sense of unpredictability, a goal that seems pretty common among their French counterparts. The album is diverse in its manner of stirring emotion much more than it is technically.

The problem here is the lack of consistency in the quality departments. IV explodes into motion with its first couple tracks "An Arrow in the Heart" and "One with the Prince with a Thousand Enemies," but never seems to get back the momentum of those first 20 minutes. It never sounds bad or half-baked or lazy thereafter, but it succumbs just a little too much to entropy. It gets, if not entirely boring, more tedious and disordered as it goes on.

Plain fact is that the album is just too long--the quality throughout isn't evenly spread. And that's probably the only thing that will get in my way of listening to this all the way through more in the future. Because otherwise, Aosoth nailed it here.