THRICE WOVEN

A return to their black metal roots, with more ambience and soft passages.

With this album WitTR overall leave behind sound on their last album Celestite and return to their black metal roots, albeit with softer sections, more synths, more ambience and guest musicians.

The production seems clearer than on earlier albums and the singing seems less buried in the mix.

The black metal is as atmospheric, raw and good as ever and the softer passages add some variance to the sound, which is half of a good thing.

Unfortunately, the ambient noises don't always add much to the songs in my opinion. I could very well do without nearly two minutes of sea noises at the end of Fires Roar in the Palace of the Moon and I understand them to be just one very long outro. The transitions between metal and ambient passages don't seem to work very well. Rather, transitions seem to be missing and they often just play metal passages and ambient passages after each other. This can make the songs seem disconnected.

As far as variance and transitions go, the pagan folk passages integrated into the black metal work much better, in my opinion. There are also more synth touches than on earlier albums, a fact that I also quite like. The added variance in singing, with some clear (guest) vocals works very well. In the Old Ones Are With Us these three things are added to the WitTR sound to great effect.

This is a strong album that I don't find quite as exciting as their run from Two Hunters to Celestial Lineage. As such it gets a good but non-essential rating from me.

Maybe this sound and style just worked better 10 years ago, as black metal has been quite thoroughly explored in the meantime.