After two singles, The Mist From the Mountains releases its first album.
Entitled Monumental – The Temple of Twilight, it was composed by Tuomas Karhumäki (vocals, Black Beast), Kena Strömsholm (vocals, ex-…and Oceans, ex-Festerday), Tuukka Ahonen (guitar), Henri Villberg (bass/keyboards, Diablerie, ex-Rapture) and Gorath Moonthorn (drums, Prevalent Resistance, ex-Alghazanth) since 2020 in Finland.
The album opens with the ice-cold Empyrean Fields, a both weighing and appeasing composition which immediately develops this contrast between all the band’s influences, beginning with this dark ambience. Scathing melodies quickly join the melting, as well as the vocalists’ howlings, feeding the majestic oppression, then the band picks into heady Old School roots for A Paean to Fire. The rhythmic’s solid basis allows the band to place the rawest and the most hypnotic elements while wearing hooking sonorities, then the journey between the band’s differents elements continues with Thus Spake the Tongueless Serpent. We feel influences are more visceral, and they even offer us Pagan and Symphonic above all on this quiet break on which the quiet break allows us to breathe before calling saturation again. The haunting rhythmic will give birth to With the Sun and the Skies and the Birds Above, a composition which begins quite quietly before allowing Black Metal’s abrasive tonalities to come over. Once again, fury will be appeased by a mystical clean sound, which will obviously invoke visceral blackness waves again, topped by powerful screams, then Master of Wilderness continues into the spikiest savagery. Between Old School infurling wave and the weighing ambience, the band allows us to catch our breath again into the darkness, welcoming mesmerizing clean vocals, then a new wave of saturation comes over before After God, the last composition. Whether the introduction is quite majesting while staying calm, the abrasing part which will follow reconnects with Black Metal’s violence, whether it is about the rhythmic’s violence or vocals, then melancholy seizies the band, which will offer a haunting final.
Even if the universe from The Mist From the Mountains is deeply anchored into an ice-cold Black Metal, the band offers very abrasive tones on Monumental – The Temple of Twilight. Quietness isn’t aside, and the majestic contrast is quickly addictive.
90/100