AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SYLVAN AWE — “PILGRIMAGE”

The artwork on the front of Sylvan Awe‘s new album Pilgrimage (their third) is one that will make most people stop in their tracks and stare for a while. It’s a slightly cropped and inverted image of a 1920 painting by the German artist Ferdinand Leeke, who died three years after completing it. The title is “Parsifal on the Way to the Grail Castle“.

Leeke seems to be best known for his depiction of scenes from Wagnerian operas, most of them commissioned by Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried after his father’s death. “Parsifal on the Way to the Grail Castle” doesn’t seem to be one of those 10 commissioned paintings, but may have been similarly influenced, given that Wagner did compose an opera called Parsifal, based on the legend of the Grail Knight.

What that legend has to do with Pilgrimage is open to conjecture, though Parsifal himself engaged in a pilgrimage back to the sanctuary where ailing Grail Knights kept watch over the Grail, after Parsifal vanquished the necromancer Klingsor and retrieved from him the Holy Spear (which pierced the side of Jesus as he died on the cross), ultimately reuniting it with the Grail.

Obviously, there must be some connection between the painting or the legend and what was accomplished on Pilgrimage by this Australian duo — Stuart Callinan (guitars, bass, vocals) and Adrian Horsman (drums). Whatever the details of that may be, you might make at least one connection when you hear the album, which we’re now premiering in advance of its December 1 release.

And that connection is in the overarching atmosphere of the music, which might be summed up as… mythic… and surprising. It may not have been constructed as a larger-than-life narrative, but it has that quality.

“Pilgrims of the Sea” begins fashioning that atmosphere with music that operates on a grand scale. Both viscerally propulsive and momentous in its drumming, the song sends waves of brilliant piercing vibrato melody cresting across the heavens.

In that song, there’s no escaping the compulsiveness of the drumming in all its constantly changing variations, and no escaping the downcast moods that coexist with the grandeur and passion in the melodic riffing and the riveting trill of the guitar-leads, or the grim determination and explosive passion in the growled and howling vocals.

Those darker moods seem to encompass grief and yearning, fear and desperation, but the music also channels resilience and fervor. And, as mentioned, there’s something ancient and unearthly about the music. It’s elaborate in both its progressions and its multi-faceted tones, something almost medieval, but powerfully hard-charging too.

 

From there, Sylvan Awe enhance the mythic atmosphere of Pilgrimage, but also expand both its emotional scope and its instrumental patterns, seeming to cross millennia as they do. “The Wolves of Wilful Isolation” opens with orchestration and piano keys that create a sense of inviting mystery, then carries the melody forward with elegant acoustic instrumentation, with a flute and strings (or something that sounds like them) in the lead.

That opening phase is a thoroughly beguiling experience, though again the drumming is a vital, pulse-pounding presence. But it’s only the beginning of a 14-minute song, a spinning gem that reveals unexpected facets — hard-rocking beats and the sprightly presence of ethereally pinging and darting keyboard tones — as well as abrasive slashing chords, wolfish snarls and pungent grunts, a wailing guitar solo, and blasting drums accompanied by riffing that whirls and soars.

And so it turns out to be a melding of antiquity and modernity, and an amalgam of moods too. Head-moving and head-spinning, high-flying and heart-breaking, it’s really a stunning extravaganza. But that doesn’t mean Sylvan Awe have ended their remarkable musical tale — far from it.

 

Rather than continue proceeding track by track, we’ll try to do something more high-level, though anything high-level is going to give the remaining four songs short shrift. What makes every one of them stand out is their creative union of divergent ingredients, that time-traveling quality so extravagantly revealed in “The Wolves of Wilful Isolation“, the exceptional skill of the performances, and how strongly the music moves the mood.

The multi-faceted melodies will get their hooks in the listeners’ heads and hearts. The rhythms fire up the heartbeat. The guitar tones are richly varied. The vocals are spine-tingling. The stylistic ingredients range into prog metal and “classic” heavy metal, and even a bit of jazziness in some of the bass-and-drum interplay, but without losing touch with the fundamental bookends of black metal and traditions rooted in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

And the moods? They’re grieving and glorious, wrenching and heroic, moody and mystical, feral and fierce, pastoral and epic.

And with that we’ll shut up and leave you to lose yourself in a truly remarkable album.

 

 

Pilgrimage includes guest orchestral arrangement and performance by Tristan Pavia, synth on “The Wolves of Wilful Isolation” by S. Callinan, and synth on “Alleviate” by A. Horsman. Callinan says:

With our third album, we wanted to explore new territory however, not deliberately in a way. I wanted to write freely without focussing on characteristics of certain genres and Pilgrimage is the final result. Full well knowing some sections will challenge some black metal purists, but a solid focus on melody which has always ran deep within my writing, dynamically more interesting and a focus on some open and unconventional black metal riffage – we are stoked on the outcome…. It will challenge some, but I’d rather that than a comfortable album that will get washed away within a fortnight of it’s release. We’ll see!

I’ll enthusiastically recommend it for fans of such bands as Panopticon, Saor, Waldgeflüster, Obsequiae, Dødheimsgard, and Wolves in the Throne Room — though it really sounds very much like its own thing.

PRE-ORDER:
https://sylvanawebm.bandcamp.com/album/pilgrimage

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https://www.facebook.com/sylvanawe