Regnum Saturni

Fell Voices continue to hone their own vision of black metal, a kind which encapsulates the spirit of the genre but which bears direct comparison to very few others. Maybe Ash Borer’s albums demonstrate some important similarities, but this band pushes the drone influences far, far further. It’s strange how the various elements can each be so ferocious, but combined they sound weirdly graceful. This is the juxtaposition at the heart of Fell Voices’s music. The drums paddle away relentlessly, the vocals howl, and the guitars buzz and whirr irritably. But all of these things smudge, becoming near-static stretches of shivering black metal; a hazy outpouring of noise that blurs into a smooth, continuous line. Their tracks tend to morph and evolve slowly over twenty minutes or so; swelling gradually up to peaks and deflating gradually into troughs, with sometimes even the odd melody being just discernible through it all. When it works, its sheer austerity can be impressive indeed.

Regnum Saturni pushes Fell Voice’s sound a few more steps down the path they have been on for a couple of albums now. Their music has never had much in the way of studio polish, but here the band have opted for something even more under-produced (and recorded live). Everything sounds fuzzy and faded, only adding to the blurring effect described above. The three tracks presented here are like lengthy exhalations of cold fog. They all begin and end with the same unwelcoming electronic buzz- bookending interludes which are very different in instrumentation to the bulk of each track, but very much the same in musical attitude. To take opener Flesh From Bone; you could play its eighteen minutes several times over looking for hints of a tune to latch onto, only ever catching opaque glimpses. It's just a barren howl. Don't take this as a criticism: Fell Voices know exactly what they are doing, and what they are doing is taking black metal to the next level of listener-unfriendliness.

If the austerity is disrupted, the culprit is often the percussion. For example, it is shifts in the drumming that push the desolate guitar patterns of Emergence into a climax of sorts. Final track Dawn, however (perhaps reflecting its name) offers us a little more flickering light. The guitar lines start to pick out melodies, slowly but surely allowing the listener to form an emotional connection with the album, albeit in its final act. Ultimately, Regnum Saturni is both a bitterly hostile record but also an engrossing one, and, after playing it loudly enough, I find it convincing as the next step for Fell Voices.