Band:	Victory Over The Sun
Album:	A Tessitura Of Transfiguration
Style:	Avantgarde metal, Black metal
Release date:	January 2020

01. The Objectless World
02. Half-Silvered Mirror
03. The Enormous Cosmos (In The Cavity Of The Mouth)
04. Casting A Bell

This is probably the messiest album I've heard thus far for 2020. But it's an impressive, beautiful kind of mess.

The promotion around Victory Over The Sun was enough to get me interested, A Tessitura Of Transfiguration being recommended by Ævangelist's Matron Thorn and described as "one woman Avant-garde black metal." The sound conjured here is definitely unusual for black metal, to say the least. Noticeably driven by a very treble-heavy, audible bass, here Victory Over The Sun offers up a highly mutilayered, dreamlike listening experience that weaves between many different moods and approaches. Seeming to draw a lot of influence from jazz, psychedelia, and symphonic music, the compositions are slow building, quite grandiose in the stylistic range that they cover, and feature quite impressive instrumental performances, especially in the drum department.

A Tessitura Of Transfiguration isn't really centered too firmly on any one delivery throughout its run, a fact that could be a good thing for the sake of diversity or could be criticized for a lack of consistency. Tracks such as "The Objectless World" and "Casting A Bell" are more like ethereal wanderings into some kind of experimental ambient territory, whereas "Half-Silvered Mirror" and "The Enormous Cosmos" tap more heavily into the black metal influence. Many shifts between these two predominant approaches abound, and the one downside to this album is that the transitions between them can often feel a bit jarring and abrupt, as if they could have afforded to be a bit smoother. For all its impressive musicianship, on A Tessitura Of Transformation it almost seems as though a bit too many ideas were spread out across too small a space.

For an album barely over the half hour mark for run time, there's quite a lot going on musically on A Tessitura For Transiguration. Perhaps a little too much. While this album does a lot more good than bad, it probably could have benefited by maybe being about 10 or 15 minutes longer, allowing for a greater spacing out of the various styles it jumps between and an overall better pacing between them. On the whole though, this is quite an intriguing listen with a treasure trove of interesting ideas offered up, and it's a listen that is certainly going to make me keep an ear out for future Victory Over The Sun material.