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██▌ Artist...: Veldes ░▐██▌
░▐██ Album....: To Drown in Bleeding Hope ░██▌░
▓▐██ Year.....: 2013 ▓▐██▓
▓▐██ Rel.Date.: 2021-05-02 ░▐██▓
▐██ Genre....: Black Metal ██▌░
░ ██▌ Label....: Razed Soul Productions ██▌
▐██ Source...: CD ▐██
░▐██▌ Type.....: Album ▐██▌░
▓▄████ Quality..: VBR, 44.1kHz, Joint Stereo ████▌░
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1. Through the Bitter Flame 6:04
2. Featherless Across the Burnt Skies 7:03
3. Earth as a Nest of Bones and Debris 5:09
4. Within These Roots Only Sickness Dwells 7:28
5. Beneath the Grieving Waters 10:38
------
36:22
'To Drown in Bleeding Hope' is the debut album from one man band Tilen
Simon of Slovenia, under the project name of Veldes. The Metal Archives
calls this atmospheric black metal, but there is so much more to this
release than that. If someone tried to tell me this was
atmospheric/melodic black/doom metal, I wouldn't be able to entirely
disagree. There are all of those elements and more, expertly woven into
a starkly beautiful picture postcard of life, death and despair.
The atmosphere is provided by heavily distorted guitars, muted bass, a
minimalistic playing style and a special vocal performance that is
undeniably black metal whilst managing to keep almost every word
understandable. There is so much emotion in Tilen's
somewhere-between-growl-and-shriek vocals. For example, the lines
"featherless they fly, across the burnt skies, where death is a fire,
and life remains ash" aren't particularly inspiring on paper, yet
through his vocal chords simple phrases become incredibly powerful and
evocative, conveying strains of futility and melancholy with ease.
Tilen also seems gifted with a natural understanding of melody, evident
on every track but especially noteworthy on 'Within These Roots Only
Sickness Dwells,' a hauntingly beautiful song that uses mournful notes
plucked from his guitar and left hanging in the air to conjure images of
grey landscapes in a dying world. When Simon needs to switch it up and
generate momentum he turns to the rhythm section as seen on closer
'Beneath the Grieving Waters,' which had me headbanging through the
faster sections. Both drums and bass are solid throughout the album,
with every note of the bass audible in the mix and a rich and satisfying
drum tone.
'Earth as a Nest of Bones and Debris' begins with a sample from the
movie The Road (2009), spoken by Viggo Mortensen of Aragorn fame. It's
an interesting idea, as the quote portrays a bleak picture and one
assumes it is intended to add to the atmosphere, however on first listen
the appearance of a 40 second audio sample at the start of a black metal
song surprised me out of the grim reverie created by the previous
tracks. I liked the idea though, and on summary listens it works well,
barring the transition from sample to actual song, which I find too
sudden for an album of this meandering pace.
Another minor complaint for the album is its length, clocking in at
36:15. This is just not long enough for a release of this style and
quality. I feel another couple of songs are needed to bring it up to the
50 minute mark so as to have enough time to properly submerge myself the
themes and emotions portrayed in this record. Overall however 'To Drown
in Bleeding Hope' is an excellent debut and one of the best albums I
have heard so far this year. I will be keenly waiting to see what Simon
follows it up with in the future.
---
In familiar atmospheric black metal fashion, Veldes is a one-man project
of Tilen Simon, who has previously performed a share of duties within a
slew of Slovenian metal bands: Nephrolith, Within Destruction, and
Wintersoul. Naming this most recent undertaking after the archaic name
of his town of residence Bled, Veldes has tapped into the fallout of
post-black metal bands like Drudkh and Wolves in the Throne Room;
traditional atmosphere and lo-fi instrumentation is mixed with an
acknowledgement of post-rock and shoegaze, and a cinematic attitude
towards composition. Though I've never had the chance to travel that far
east, I hear Bled is renowned for its stark natural beauty and
historical significance. With this in mind, it seems fitting that Veldes
has been so named; To Drown in Bleeding Hope is a gloomy paean to the
search of meaning in nature when none can be found in society. The
album's generic elements cannot go without mention, but the effective
atmosphere and set of memorable compositions make Veldes' debut to the
world a strong step in the right direction.
For what Veldes initially lacks in terms of a unique or distinct
execution, Tilen Simon demonstrates his greatest strengths here to be
related to composition and songwriting. Before I even mention the
project's performance-based merits, the songs here feel fleshed out and
memorably arranged to an extent I have rarely heard in atmospheric black
metal. No previously held genre-rules are broken, but Tilen Simon seems
to know exactly how to make a musical idea reach its potential. Each of
the five songs on the album have at least one riff or motif that stands
out in the listener's mind after the album has finished. Although Veldes
is not immune to the atmospheric black metal epidemic of repetition, the
said repetition is handled in such a way that the music never feels
boring. Even when Veldes treads softly into slower-paced territory with
"Within These Roots Only Sickness Dwells" and "Beneath the Grieving
Waters", Simon's skill with building compositions doesn't fail; the
music stays interesting, and the atmosphere continues to broil. In spite
of the slower sections' tendency to recall funeral doom aesthetics, To
Drown in Bleeding Hope draws a great deal from the preexisting formulas
of its style. Veldes' nature-inspired, lo-fi angle could be drowned in a
flood of like-sounding bands if based on style alone; the lack of an
inherently engaging style does seek to hold Veldes back, but it doesn't
get in the way of the songwriting, which gives every impression of
having come from a place of inspiration and sincerity.
"Earth as a Nest of Bones and Debris" opens with one of the most
effective uses of samples I've heard in recent listening. Veldes'
sampling of a particularly bleak monologue from the film adaptation of
Cormac McCarthy's The Road seeks to put my stomach in knots each time I
hear it. Although the transition back into the black metal feels a bit
abrupt, the rest of the song's tone matches the sample's atmospheric
precedent perfectly. I know it's only a miniscule touch with regards to
the album as a whole, but the way the despair and melancholic pessimism
of The Road weaves itself so seamlessly into Veldes' emotional tapestry
makes me wonder why I haven't heard that film sampled on more black
metal albums.
Lyrically, To Drown in Bleeding Hope gives an apt indicator of its
content and relative quality in the title itself. Tilen Simon's poetry
is solipsistic in its attitude, revolving almost entirely around sorrow,
loneliness and death. It's such standard fare for the genre that it
virtually denies analysis or criticism for good or bad; at the very
least, it fits the album's despondent atmosphere. Though the lyrics may
verge on the cliche, Simon's vocals offer an impressive presence in the
music, a tortured howl stretched to a greater expanse with the help of
some tastefully moderate reverb. On the topic of effects and production,
Veldes is the result of an artist with some obvious experience in the
field; the guitars, while a bit dry at times, have been kept pleasantly
raw, and the synth textures are cleverly innocuous to the point where an
inattentive listener might not even pick up on them. The only real
disappointment regarding Simon's realization of his music lies in the
use of artificial drums, which sound dull and unpleasantly monotonous in
execution, in spite of being relatively well programmed and arranged.
While Veldes' raw production, emphasis on atmosphere, gloomy mood and
Romanticized handling of depression all feel like resoundingly average
fare for atmospheric black metal, Tilen Simon's memorable, careful skill
with composition makes the album a worthy experience. To Drown in
Bleeding Hope offers a rare experience in black metal where each track
feels distinct from the others; Veldes doesn't serve to innovate any of
the genre's lasting trademarks with this one, but Tilen Simon's first
foray into atmospheric black metal with this fresh project has proved
bountiful, not only in terms of the atmosphere it conjures, but the
emotions that atmosphere has provoked.
---
Veldes is the solo work of Slovenian guitarist Tilen Simon, otherwise
known as Isvaroth from Nephrolith, whose debut I reviewed a couple years
ago. Unlike that act, which was a more decidedly face-scathing brand of
Scandinavian-styled black metal, here the focus is largely upon swaths
of involved, atmospheric sound reliant on more minimalistic chord
patterns and melodies, secondary drum beats and even some samples. I
suppose it sounds like it belongs in the Summoning camp, though this is
directly centered around the guitar itself, and not the synths and
masterful use of electronic percussion that those Austrians are known
for. While To Drown in Bleeding Hope is not a long album by any means
(36 minutes), it's certainly one that demands some patience on the
listener's part.
These aren't dense compositions loaded down with riffs, and really only
the first track "Through the Bitter Flames" casts the hue of a more
traditional black metal blaze, with warm and mildly dissonant chord
patterns that are refreshingly not all that predictable; though some of
the tremolo guitar fills are bland, and even if this has the most
intense beats throughout the album, they're still incredibly passive
beneath those shimmering, bright guitars and Tilen's desperate, immense
rasping vocal inflection. The other four tracks are more the norm,
spacious and gracious and often involving catchy clean guitars
accompanied by slightly swelling synth synth lines that give you the
impression your watching birds take off over a lake. For instance, the
openings to "Featherless Across the Burnt Skies" or "Beneath the
Grieving Waters" are quite stunning, and when the metal element arrives
it all feels like this vast, rustic space opening above you, as profound
as the onrush of dawn, and I think that was the point here. Emotional,
outdoorsy black metal as opposed to some sinister Satanic ritual being
performed in a cave, with image-heavy lyrics of renewal and decay that
do well to spark the listener's imagination.
Production is quite impressive here for just one guy, and though the
drums feel too artificial in spots, they're not exactly the strong
point, usually just keeping the pace cleanly, or informing the tempo
changes. The bass lines are all rather simple and gentle, but they do
their job in adding a deeper dimension to the generally high pitched
rhythm guitars. I was scratching my head at the spoken word sequence in
"Earth As a Nest of Bones and Debris", finding it eerily familiar, and
then realized it was Viggo Mortensen's character from the film version
of Cormac McCarthy's The Road! Aesthetically, it fits in rather well
with the pianos and walls of distortion Simon evokes here, and
inevitable eruptions of resonant snarls. In general, the whole album
possesses a consistency to it which flooded my thoughts with imagery of
mists, hazy golden mornings, wildlife and an absence of mankind and
civilization, so those seeking out a more majestic, rural black metal
sensibility will likely get something out of Veldes. It's not exactly
intricate or complex, and I think the rhythm section could be a little
more ambitious to produce stronger results, but if you're looking for
breathing, captivating black metal with a folk tint ala Summoning,
Mirkwood, Elffor, Kroda, Falkenbach, or Drudkh it's worth hearing.
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