German band Empyrium’s admirable path consistently shows them preserving an highly unique voice while adapting to varying contexts and an evolving inventory of skills. The band’s strengths as composers and the power of their vision allow them to select elements across several styles according to their utility for the summoning of a particular atmosphere. The new album testifies to the band’s continuously perfected command of a variety of techniques in order to weave together expressive musical landscapes. As usual, inspiration is taken from the beauty of natural surroundings and folklore, and this affiliation is immediately apparent even if the listener immerses himself solely in the sound without taking a look at the lyrics.
Contrasting with (or rather complementing) the longing and wistfulness that define much of Empyrium’s work, the metal guitar sections occasionally rise in the form of surprisingly direct and vivid melodies with an epic bent; at other points, the guitars opt for the background, allowing the keyboards to provide the main melodic role and emotional colour. In the longer and more ambitious songs, such as the opening and closing tracks, these riffs will be contrasted with more meditative and mysterious melodies, usually with the addition of acoustic sections, before giving rise to a new theme that acts as a synthesis or resolution of what came before. Through these dynamics, Empyrium’s talent for authentic and purposeful narratives is revealed in the way distinct moods are developed and given air to breathe, while being aptly harmonized into the whole of a satisfyingly rich journey through misty forests or vast mountains.
Throughout these compositions, wintry melancholy is joined by an almost childlike sense of wonder in the face of Nature – let us recall that Romantics such as Blake and Wordsworth, and proto-Romantics like Traherne, often exalted childhood as the ideal condition for the apprehension of the divine; it should also be remembered that bandleader Markus Stock has explicitly declared the influence of Romanticism at various occasions. This state of magical enchantment and rapture by the vastness of Nature, obviously without neglecting its sombre facets, reveals itself as the very foundation of Empyrium’s music and its underlying spirit. On the more serene moments, acoustic instruments including the gentle guitar and clean vocals ranging from whispers to the beautiful singing of Thomas Helm emphasize the bardic mode that actually underlies the rest of the album’s proposal in its depiction of Nature as the object of ecstatic contemplation or the backdrop of mystical folklore and timeless myth.
In comparison with the previous album, this one raises the metal quotient, although, true to the band’s method, it is still treated as a tool among others. The admirable cohesion and tightness that Empyrium attain on this album is due both to the clarity of their ideas and the mastery of these many tools and their synergetic interplay, which seems to have been refined even further through the experience they’ve accumulated along the years.
