CROW BLACK SKY – SIDEREAL LIGHT, VOL. TWO

(Andy Synn offers his thoughts on the new album from South Africa’s Crow Black Sky)

While the whole “two year album cycle” thing is fine for some bands (though I’d say it’s more common amongst bands signed to more prominent labels) not every artist works, or should work, to the same schedule.

Case in point, Cape Town’s Crow Black Sky released their first album back in 2010, but then waited eight more years before releasing the follow-up, Sidereal Light, Vol. One.

In hindsight you almost wonder why the band didn’t change their name in the intervening period (though I can understand why not, since Crow Black Sky is an excellent name) as Volume One represented a significant shift in sound for the group, moving them towards a “cosmic” Black Metal sound that was as rich in atmosphere as it was in aggression… and all the better for it.

And now, after five long years, we finally get to hear where this path has taken them with the recent release of Sidereal Light, Vol. Two.

Made up of four magnificently massive, majestically melodic, tracks, Volume Two takes everything that made its predecessor so good – the coruscating guitars, the light-speed blastbeats, the vicious vocals (which prove that, contrary to popular opinion, in space everyone actually can hear you scream)  – and simply doubles-down on them, pushing the energy and intensity levels to new heights in the process.

But what really separates it from its predecessor is the band’s embrace of an even more other-worldly sense of atmosphere and ambience, exchanging the spacey symphonics of Volume One for a series of astral synthscapes more suggestive of the transcendental, trance-like vibe of Mesarthim or Progenie Terrestre Pura.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that Crow Black Sky have given up on their more blisteringly blackened side – far from it, in fact – and one listen to outstanding opener “The Blinding Might of Creation” should put any such fears to rest, as the group quickly cut loose with some of the most furious and face-melting material of their career so far (aided and abetted by a suitably scorching, blast-propelled performance from guest-drummer Frank Schilperoort – also known for his work with the likes of The Monolith Deathcult and God Dethroned).

However, it’s still the underlying, ineffable vibe of this album – one which is definitely more Khonsu than Keep of Kalessin this time around – which is perhaps its greatest, and most compelling, strength, with the baleful beauty of songs such as “With Starlight In Our Eyes”, “The Sapien Shadow”, and captivating closer “Omniscient” successfully cultivating and combining all the different aspects of the band’s sound – the metallic and synthetic, the atmospheric and melodic (including, it must be noted, a handful of absolutely spellbinding solos) – into a singular, sublime whole.

So, let me be clear about this, while it may have taken the band a little longer than expected to deliver Sidereal Light, Vol. Two into the world, I’d say the wait was certainly worth it.