TenHornedBeast — Hunts & Wars
The album is a really a fairly even balance between longer/building tracks and shorter more atmospheric tracks. There are in all four longer tracks that last between just over the seven minute to just shy of twenty minute mark a-piece. And these tracks utilize more of the wavering & stripped sub-bass doom riffs, the ritual and military percussive marches, and the more atmospheric noise elements- all to make epic, often building ,dramatic but very grim pieces. Then we have the shorter tracks which really break up and give you a slight atmospheric breather from the longer epic works and these are a mixture of: bleak/ subtle painted drone matter or darken organ weaves, looped doomed neo-classical dirges, and generally more subdued grimly cinematic moments.
As the albums title suggest there’s more than a whiff of battlefields & conflict running through the album sonic veins, but the wars, battles and deaths that are audibly summoned up here are not of the glamorous or Hollywood variety. No- this is all about exhausted and gaunt soldiers fighting knee deep in mud, blood and excrement. Or soldiers slowly dying all alone in a bleak drizzly soacked forest glades, where birds circle getting ready to pick their flesh when they can no longer fend them off..
Sure “Hunts & Wars” is highly bleak and hopeless listening experience, yet there is light and shade in the sonic suffering and moroseness that makes this so much more replayble and rewarding as a whole. One of 2010’s grim highlights