GUÐVANGIR (NO) - Slik elven renner
Digital download
https://pestproductions.bandcamp.com/album/slik-elven-renner
Those who have been morphed into stones still dream of the Ocean, Its waves, of the innumerable glittering shards upon their stony bodies -- Night, Morning, your perpetual wandering, all shattered in this cycle as old as the Lands and Fjords. The moment you step into their mountainous shadows and stormlike rages -- from above -- an unexpected moment of serenity fills you up, as if this long voyage is nothing but a reconciliation with the frailty of mortal life. Till the mountains and rocks themselves perished into the meadows and soils, under the crushing weight of Nature’s Divinity. Wandering as dying. This is how the rivers flow. No need to hurry.
Monolithic and somber, Guðvangir’s debut reforge the forsaken solitude of Nordic Nature into sonic terrain. Consisting of three enormous tracks, Slik Elven Renner manages to summon the woeful poetics of funeral doom metal, while tinged in a stifling and looming despondence, as if Mournful Congregation meets The Ruins of Beverast. Leading the listeners to traverse that almost-fantastic landscape, across nights and days, with only a vague trace of light hidden within the crushing immensity enveloping the voyage -- until at last, as the final track comes to its closure, willingly vanish into radiating nothingness.