Spectral Lore is back with a fifth album.
Entitled Eterófotos, it comes seven years after the last album to date from the greek musician Ayloss (all instruments/vocals, Divine Element, Mystras).
Recorded between 2017 and 2020 by the project’s mastermind, remixed and masterised by Colin Martson (Gorguts, Behold the Arctopus, Krallice…) and illustrated by Alessandro Bianchi Sicioldr, the album promises a new journey thanks to its “epic and transcending” Atmospheric Black Metal. Seven songs. One hour and a quarter of sound.
Atrapos (“Pathway”), the first song, makes us immediately sink into the musician’s thick and contrasted melting, between raw elements, soaring melodies, visceral screams and incredible technicality. The rhythmic is still very thick, while harmonics fly in every part of our mind, haunted by those howlings, then everything calms down. We barely have time to breathe, because the rhythmic goes back to this creative madness. The Golden Armor also melts visceral rage, heady riffs and violent creativity, surmounted by piercing leads, stabbing parts and a dark groove, just like Initiation into the Misery, a song that draws from each part of the musician’s universe. To this solid basis, the creator adds diversified screams, frightening leads and above all this ghostly but epic ambience.
The Sorcerer Above the Clouds begins with this clean sounding, heady and worrying part, that gives birth to a dark intestinal rage. The howlings’ rage, accompanied by backing vocals madness, throws us into an unfathomable blackness, that finally peters out with a quiet riff. Apocalypse offers us a dissonant calmness made to slowly enter our mind to wreak havoc. The explosion creates a haunting and melancholic atmosphere, dubbed by a monumental oppression that progressively increases to release us after a larsen on Eterófotos. The song is more oppressive and visceral than the others, creating a suffocating basis to place mystical leads, unhealthy rantings and a rhythmic with FOlk elements before leaving us on Terean, an instrumental song of nineteen minutes. Very long, the track offers an oppressive quietness, an ambient blackness as well as a worrying and mystical atmosphere, that allow us to close the album with the same basis than the beginning.
Spectral Lore’s new adventure stays true to the project’s basis. Mad, unreal and transcending, Eterófotos offers violent, piercing and seizing sonorities like just a few bands are able to create, while offering an incredible diversity.
95/100