Strange: the promo email that comes with this talks about how this is, for all intents and purposes, a full-length album (which would be Spectral Lore’s fifth), but that it was decided to call it an EP to emphasise to the listeners that it’s ‘an experiment’. I don’t really understand the logic but, yeah, an experiment this is, and quite an intriguing one.

Gnosis is basically an attempt to mix black metal elements with ideas drawn both from the traditional music of their own country (Greece) as well as from those much further East. Traditional instrumentation is used in a happily non-gimmicky way, and Eastern scales are brought to the fore in the melodies. But the most defining characteristics of the album (sorry, the EP) are 1) the way the songs are structured and 2) the mood. The tracks here are long, almost always mid-tempo, and built around pulsing, minimalist rhythms (barely a blastbeat in sight). This could in one interpretation put it in a similar place to other trance-inducing black metal bands like Hic Iacet or Void Meditation Cult, but the difference is actually huge. That’s because the tone here is weirdly meditative and even uplifting. The melodic heart of most of the tracks is the guitar, which rather than being confined to particular riffs, sort of meanders around particular (often quite bright) modes in a free-flowing, quasi-improvisatory fashion, floating serenely above the percussion. Gnosis’s journey through the ages is probably the high-point: 15 minutes of this kind of thing, which builds slowly up and up until the lead guitar takes off into a kind of Maiden-esque sea shanty (think of the Celt-invoking lines from a track like Blood Brothers).

As noted, another distinguishing feature here is the instrumentation. The traditional stringed instruments are brought most obviously to the fore in the delicate and enigmatic, largely acoustic interludes (e.g. Averroes’s search or For Aleppo). But, there are other times when they are brought in to shadow and even trade-off with the electric guitars, as on Dualism. The vocals themselves are absent for long stretches: when they do appear it’s as a largely submerged background hiss.

Not that it’s a completely non-threatening, hippyish album. Occasionally it accelerates, as on the penultimate track with its more aggressive lead lines and punchier riffing, which coalesce into this weird kind of metallic folk dance at its climax. But overall it is a somewhat refreshing and palette-cleansing experience that many people will be drawn into, should they give it a chance.