This is the third and final chapter in Elend's first trilogy, the Officium Tenebrarum.
The album alternates between two primary compositional styles: the hauntingly gentle and the chaotic, atonal, blaringly loud, serpentine-flames-and-whirlwinds of-hell, total mindfucks. It is the second variety that caused my friend so much anxiety, though the first isn't exactly a day at the circus either. Elend took the old formula and turned up the atonality. Rather than bathe the listener in warm Romantic textures, The Umbersun would rather attack the listener with the dark underbelly of Modernism. Which isn't a bad thing, insofar as the listener doesn't approach the album with a headache. The music still retains much of its ambience, but the ambience is intensely dark and depressing here. There is beauty amid the chaos, but it's the beauty of a ghostly female apparition floating among the tombstones, rather than that of an ascendant angel.
The vocals are still characterized primarily by angelic soprano lines, male whispers, and terrible shrieks. The shrieks are everywhere now, and blast with furious frequency throughout the music's chaotic textures. The soprano vocals here sound far darker (and less sensuous) than before, given the somewhat different context of the music; listen to the soprano work on the Bram Stoker's Dracula soundtrack for an idea. This album features a good-sized choir, and Elend makes good use of it. The choir is best used in creating dissonance: in one part the choir is made to sing in contradictory vocal harmonies and in another, the choir actually screams and shrieks in total disarray!
This album is dark. Really dark. It's aggressive, chaotic and generates a suffocating atmosphere of horror and alienation.
Review by James Slone
