Band:	Yellow Eyes
Album:	Master's Murmur
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	October 2023

01. Old Acclivity Dream
02. Master's Murmur
03. Winter Is Looking
04. Irrlicht
05. When Jackie's Lamps Have Showed
06. The Ritual Is Gone
07. Gold Door To Blindness
08. Tremble Blue Morning
09. Garden Trick

You know there's something odd with your Yellow Eyes album when the title isn't three words randomly strung together. Instead we have something more like a detour EP experimenting more with how the band sounds like when the metal is stripped away.

Yellow Eyes have always been able to integrate various non-metal elements into their black metal sound. Ambient and atmospheric black metal generally relies on at least some sort of ambient or folk or anything in between to enhance that sense of atmosphere, and Yellow Eyes have merged the rawness of black metal with some folk melodies and ambient texturing to achieve some of the most immersive black metal out there. When I covered Rare Field Calling I was a bit too oblivious to how the folk and the field recordings worked to enhance just that, but I did notice the slight weirdness of the sound they were going for, though it wasn't one that I would necessarily call avant-garde or really properly put into words. Some of that is a bit more clear now that we have a version of that sound with the metal stripped away.

There's more to Master's Murmur than just being the non-metal version of Yellow Eyes' usual sound. For one, there is still some metal in it, only sporadically used to provide the final oomph to the ominous sound. But most importantly, because of the void left by metal's absence, Yellow Eyes have to dive deeper into some of these genres to fill that void, and some of them have barely had a presence in Yellow Eyes' music before. Because a lot of the structures still have a very black metal feel to them, aided by some of the black elements like shrieks and blast beats remaining, the niche black ambient subgenre (think ambient black metal but with the scaled tipped towards ambient) seems to be the most effective tag I could attach to it, but it goes a bit deeper than that.

A lot of the inspiration seems to be taken from the industrial/neofolk scene of acts like Coil and Current 93, acts whose weirdness and creativity often create a type of sonic darkness most metal acts can only dream of, and hearing these sounds in a context that's more influenced by black metal is a pretty interesting take. Couple that with some Dead Can Dance-ish neoclassical darkwave and with how one of the sort-of black metal leftovers also come in the forms of a lot of synths that end up as just dungeon synth without the black metal backdrop, and you've got a weird mish mash. There are bits of it that remind me more of the band's side-project, Sunrise Patriot Motion that tackled tangential non-metal genres like gothic rock and post-punk merged with black metal, and hearing how ambient, neofolk, and dungeon synth are tackled here from the same perspective makes it very obvious that both albums were done by mostly the same people.

With Master's Murmur acting as more of a prelude to an upcoming Yellow Eyes album planned for next year, presumably one that will return to black metal, one could see Master's Murmur as more of a playground that will lead to further integration of these sounds in the future main line of albums, but also as a weird little album by itself.