I’m sure no one’s counting (including me), but I don’t manage to write many stand-alone album reviews in a given year. In the time I have available to devote to this site, I spend most of it doing other things. I listen to many forthcoming albums that I like a great deal, and yet never manage to say anything about (many more I never manage to hear at all). And once an album is released, if I haven’t already written about it, I tend to ruefully shake my head at myself and move on down the road to new things looming on the horizon ahead.

This is a very rare occasion when I’m not doing that. Grey Heaven Fall’s Black Wisdom was released last October by the small Russian label Aesthetics of Devastation. I received an advance digital copy, and then in December the label sent me a CD. I thought the album was an amazing accomplishment, one of the best I heard in 2015, yet I still didn’t manage to write about it. And that would have been that, except this label is persistent, and they contacted me again recently. Sometimes that kind of persistence can be aggravating. In this case, it made me think again about what a tremendously creative and powerful album Black Wisdom is, and I convinced myself that even now, almost six months after the release, I owed it to the band to say so.

Trying to describe the multifaceted music or explain its unusual appeal is difficult, especially for someone like me who’s still a rank amateur when it comes to writing about music. But I’m going to try, comforted by the knowledge that at the end of this effort I can embed a full stream of the music and let it speak for itself. Continue reading »