Mare Cognitum mounts again.
Since ten years, year of his first album, Jacob Buczarski (all instruments/vocals, Acathexis) never cease to spread an impressive weaponry of creativity. And Solar Paroxysm, its fifth album, is no exception to this tradition.
Composed of five songs, this album carries and buffets us between waves of Atmospheric Black Metal for nearly an hour. The songs were made to be a single flow, from a painful melancholy surmounted by howlings and a piercing rhythmic, to airy and ghostly leads like on Antaresian, the first song. The introduction is quiet, but the rhythmic falls upon us and sweeps us without letting us time to breathe in its long and furious run, inhabited by howlings and oniric harmonics. The ice-cold Frozen Star Divination is next, and we feel that riffs are rawer, more sharp and vocals also follow this dynamic. The rhythmic regularly bursts into flames, spraying us with all this internal rage in an aggressive, but also soaring and cathartic way.
We find the same fascinating and spiking sonorities in Terra Requiem, a way slower and more haunting song that draws from Doom to crush us as much as it amazes us. The song still keeps its intensity thanks to majestic sonorities, then finally speeds up before this tearing final that leads us to the dark Luminous Accretion. Way more shrilling harmonics, airy sounds and still this fast basis. The song picks into Post-Black as well as Progressive influences to enrich this so powerful sound, that doesn’t hesitate to brutally break for a suffocating part before resuming, then it lets place to Ataraxia Tunnels. This last song takes faraway and ghostly tones back, while adding them to an epic but dramatic ambiance of this seizing and uninterrupted Black Metal, that finally makes us land after a magnificent final.
Mare Cognitum is obviously known by Atmospheric Black Metal enthusiasts, and the reason is simple. Solar Paroxysm adds to a very rich discography an incredible album, that makes us lose the concept of time thanks to its rage and its melancholy.
95/100