Band:	Ragana
Album:	Desolation's Flower
Style:	Post black metal, Atmospheric sludge metal
Release date:	October 2023

01. Desolation's Flower
02. Woe
03. Ruins
04. DTA
05. Winter's Light Pt. 2
06. Pain
07. In The Light Of The Burning World

Heavy music for heavy emotions.

I'm coming into Ragana's music as more of a newcomer. I have heard the name floating around lately mostly due to them having released a split with Thou and then signing to The Flenser, both of which were reason enough to pay attention whenever that name would float around again, which happened with the release of Desolation's Flower. I assume I won't be the only one for whom Desolation's Flower would be their first taste of Ragana's music, and even if I did check out their previous albums, I won't attempt to contextualize this album too much, especially since a lot of it works on its own rather than some culmination of direction. Weird as it is to sort of dismiss nearly a decade of music prior, there's been a very significant pause before this album's release, so it's only fitting to look at it with fresh eyes.

First and foremost, Ragana is a duo, thus the soundscape is pretty minimal with guitars, drums, and vocals being pretty much the only elements to be part of it. There's an inherent simplicity to it, both in terms of the soundscape and also because of the slow and heavy nature of the music, there's a lot in the songwriting that relies on repetition and drawn-out sections where the heavy lifting is done by the heaviness of the sound herein. The riffing is pretty bareboned too, and the lyrics also rely a lot on repeating a certain phrase to emphasize its emotional impact. The core of the sound, or at least the more overtly metal side of it, is thus pretty simple, and that comes with pros and cons. Because of how much it relies on being emotionally resonant, that the interplay between the thick fuzzy riffing, the punchy and monolithic drumming, and the cutting blackened shrieks does enough to keep the listener invested. It worked for me, but I can just as easily see someone not really feeling it.

A lot of what's interesting about it are the moments where it deviates from that core, whether through its concept or through the more non-metal elements. Conceptually, a lot of it and especially the title track is dedicated to queer ancestors, and the song "DTA" brings that to a more contemporary context by sampling chants from a recent protest, giving the album's emotional impact a bit less ambiguity. The duo switching their instruments from song to song does give each track a bit of personality, something that gets more obvious in the tracks that have less metal in them. The mellow moments that do feel pretty familiar as a contrast to the heavier moments feel even more pronounced than expected, getting an almost slowcore/indie rock vibe, with the last track especially sounding eerily close to Mogwai's "Take Me Somewhere Nice".

There's some tangible catharsis in the music here, despite or maybe because of its simplicity, and because of how that simplicity is used alongside its more specific elements.