TAINT
Secrets and Lies
(Candlelight)

RIP KC
Spinguolf
(Alone / Influx)

CLERIC
Cumberbund
(Sound Devastation)

ZODIAK
Sermons
(Translation Loss)

ACHENAR
All Will Change
(Earthen)

HELRUNAR
Baldr Ok Iss 

(Lupus Lounge)

YOG
Years of Nowhere

(Get a Life!)

MORE REVIEWS

Where’s the movie? I need the image. I am starving for some celluloid. This could fit so well. All the ominosity would be multiplied. We need to get this in motion, take it to another plane. Get it truly on its four feet and running. The gorgeous cover artwork? I want those clouds to pass, to move with the hours of the day. I want those branches to shake slowly and I want the sky, to much like the music, slowly darken engulfing us in a bed sheet of despair. Then we are talking. We are talking serious business. Which Achenar certainly is. Don’t get me wrong. This is pretty cinematic stuff. All Will Change moves with the confidence of a Fassbinder camera, of a Haneke still shot. And much like the work of those two masters, Achenar takes time. First stirring things about, then going for several disparate angles.  It is not about the knock out but about how you deliver a psychological pummeling equivalent of a Holyfield jab.

Yet, there’s nothing to see here beyond the beautiful nature of the insert panel so leave it to the listener to add its grain of salt. Work with me here. Achenar is a one man band. Not of the bedroom black metal wave, this Scotsman is here for the impact and with that objective in mind he’s taken four years to come up with All Will Change. Using many resources (of which most bedroom black metallers have none), I am sure wasn’t the issue, but pulling them together into one converging twelve-song disc probably was.  

In other words, don’t come here expecting a drone album. Or an ethereal noise attack. As All Will Change to me sounds like the soundtrack to a dark and experimental flick. Starting with “Origin” and its distant opening, then moving into the mournful acoustics and doleful majesty of the vocals in “Survive Yourself”, we can tell this guy means business. “The Suicide of Giants” is more like it. An IDM charged tune of samples, vocals, filtered guitars, beeps and nightmarish histrionics, it’s at this juncture where Achenar truly escapes its dunk aura. “Verify Me” is all mood, and so are several of the other songs that intentionally escape all conventionality. In many of these Achenar sounds too fascinated with the weird to concentrate on senseful songwriting, but when he does, he falls in trance. And with him, so will you.

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