Recommended for fans of: Ultha, Wiegedood, Altar of Plagues
Well, it seems that we have once again completed another rotation around the sun.
And so, with thoughts of celestial cycles and perpetual cosmic patterns at the forefront of my mind I present to you the last Synn Report of 2024, wherein we journey deep into the soul and psyche of Tempestarii.
2017 – TEMPLE OF SKIES
There is, indeed, something appropriately reverential about the shimmering, shivering opening minutes of “Holy Dread”, whose enigmatic ambience eventually gives way to a veritable torrent of seething distortion and scorching drums – interwoven with threads of keening melody and volleys of snarling vocals – that ultimately builds to a fittingly majestic climax (and an appropriately atmospheric coda) which lays down the foundation of the band’s sound in just under eleven minutes of evocative extremity.
“Gaiain Mind” then takes things in an even darker, and arguably even more intense, direction, with the raw energy and relentless fury of the song’s opening minutes never once letting up… not, that is, until the track transforms entirely during its mid-section into something altogether more minimalist and sinister… only to explode back to life mere moments later as part of a clever mislead which makes the subsequent eruption of venom and viscera feel even harsher and nastier by comparison.
With “Shroud of Horns” the album then shifts it’s approach slightly, the song’s morose opening ambience (and subsequent doom-laden dirge) wending through the same gloom-shrouded mire which early Altar of Plagues once traversed – a similarity only further reinforced by the way the track then moves organically back and forth between electrifying tremolo and crashing chords, reckless blastbeats and ragged, stomping rhythms – which then transitions, almost seamlessly, into the titanic, nearly thirteen-minute, “Gold Lattice”, whose merciless metallic mid-section (featuring some of the most aggressive, abrasive moments on the entire album) is bookended by a hypnotic, atmosphere-heavy opening and a harrowingly bleak, yet hauntingly beautiful, finale.
It all concludes with the cathartic cascade of “Neurosis”, a song whose ever-present melodic undercurrent weaves and winds its way throughout every punishing passage of blackened belligerence and every moody moment of immersive introspection as the song barrels, with wild and unkempt abandon, towards its climax.
2020 – CHAOS AT FEAST
With its richer, more powerful production and even more ferocious and focussed delivery, Chaos at Feast more than earns its comparisons to Wiegedood at their most biggest and boldest, with tumultuous ten-minute opener “Deathwards Xibalba” practically bursting from the speakers – following its short, scene-and-mood-setting introduction, with a newfound intensity which quickly eclipses all but the most outlandishly extreme moments from the band’s debut as it blasts and blazes and bombards you with a barrage of writhing riffs, rippling snare-patterns, and ringing cymbal strikes (beneath which the keen-eared listener will detect an insidiously infectious layer of menacing melody) as it builds, relentlessly, to its doom-laden, atmosphere-drenched, finale.
The eruption of molten metallic fury – part scalding melody, part screeching dissonance – which then explodes into your eardrums is entitled “Our Spears Point to the Heavens”, and effectively represents the album’s increased focus on streamlined savagery and malevolent memorability in microcosm, featuring as it does some of the most mesmerically intense riffage and hypnotically hooky rhythms as yet created under the Tempestarii banner, while the stop-start, sturm und drang, of “Aeternus” further embodies the strange irresistibility and compelling intensity of the album (with baroque, baritone clean vocals and sullen, sinuous bass lines playing an even more prominent role in crafting the song’s epic atmosphere) in the way that each and every listen seems to reveal yet more hidden layers of depth and meaning behind the music.
Finally, and aptly, the album reaches its apex with the gleaming, frost-bitten guitars and grandiose, sky-scraping auroras of “High Celestial Peaks”, whose precise (yet primal) avalanche of bombastic blastbeats and splashing cymbals propels the song ever onwards – through the grinding, gloaming valleys of the track’s mid-section, past the echoing lake of spellbinding ambience which signifies the beginning of the end – to its towering crescendo.
2024 – A CONSTELLATION OF DEAD STARS
Don’t be fooled by the gleaming white cover art – if anything Tempestarii‘s third album is their darkest work yet, reminiscent in many ways of early Ultha as it coils around you in waves of claustrophobic, soul-crushing dread.
This quickly becomes apparent once the spectral ambience which opens “Radiant Asunder” is torn apart by the coruscating coronal ejection of fire and fury which follows – the distortion of the guitars is denser, the punch of the drums more physical, and the overlaying/underlying atmosphere more oppressive.
And yet, even at its most intense – and, make no mistake, this is one stunningly intense track, even at its doomiest – there’s something strangely trance-like about it, every reeling, repeating riff and propulsive percussive pattern producing a mesmerising, magnetic effect that’s impossible to resist.
“Sorrowful Concrescence” doubles-down on the desolate, doom-laden atmospherics and weighty, gloom-heavy guitars more than ever before, displaying a willingness to let the music simmer and dwell which – even as the song begins to pick up speed (and, make no mistake about it, by the time the track peaks in its thunderous mid-section, the kick drums are absolutely flying) – helps set A Constellation of Dead Stars even further apart from its predecessors (especially towards the end of the song where the ringing guitar-work and resonating ambience combine to conjure an even more cosmic sense of scale and scope).
With “The Restless Earth” Tempestarii then unleash all the tension stored up during the previous track in a blazing Black Metal maelstrom of scything riffage and blinding blastbeats – interspersed with moments of moody introspection and laced with layers of mournfully majestic soundscaping – which clears the way for the epic extremity of “In Dreamless Sleep” (eleven-and-a-half minutes of abyssal atmospherics and ambient desolation wrapped around a cacophonous core of raging melody and writhing dissonance which epitomises both the ferocious violence and creative, dynamic ambition at the heartof the album.