Farewell To The Sun, the brand new full-length release from Vow Of Thorns, is a fantastic listen that will draw you in and really engage you as a listener.
One of the best elements of this album is the fact that all the sections are treated equally – more often than not, the vocals take centre stage and can be quite dominating over the rest of the piece, but with Farewell To The Sun it’s more of a level playing field and there’s lots of lush instrumentally driven sections that add both ambience and drive to the album as a whole. Meanwhile, the vocals add meat and momentum to the sound when needed, and hold back when it isn’t. Farewell To The Sun, a track split into three parts, is a particularly good example of this, with the first part being instrumentally driven, the second part being vocally driven and the third being more of a ‘combined’ effort.
At times, the album is a little on the repetitive side, and it feels like some tracks could easily shave a few minutes off their duration without losing a great deal of the track’s essence, but that’s only really a minor complaint because it could also be argued that this simply adds more ambience to the album.
As a whole, a great little listen that will hopefully make waves in the ambient/atmospheric black metal scene.
7/10
