EMBRACE OF THORNS - ENTROPY DYNAMICS

EMBRACE OF THORNS - ENTROPY DYNAMICS

Country: Greece

Year: 2022

Label: Nuclear Winter Records

When I want to learn about a band, I usually choose their first album to listen to for start. If I like the music, then I study the lyrics. If the lyrics satisfy me, even better. Then I listen to the rest albums of the band, read interviews in order to gain more information and if I am lucky enough one day I meet the band on a concert or even personally.

With Embrace of Thorns everything happened in reverse order. Firstly, I coincidentally met them on the other side of the Earth. Then I read a very interesting interview on FDOM, where I got impressed by the mentality and the deep, thoughtful ideas of the vocalist Archfiend Devilpig as well as by the proficient way he uses the English language to express himself. By that interview I could assume two things: firstly that the vocalist would be very good at writing lyrics and secondly that his bandmates would be as skilled and devoted as he is in creating art. The next thing I did is that I grabbed their latest album Entropy Dynamics (CD, 2022) and read the lyrics, just because I was curious if my first assumption was right. The majority of the lyrics were written by the vocalist as I had expected. They are not just the "lyrics" that I would expect to see in a black/death metal album, for me they are something more than "lyrics" , it is dark poetry, so deeply expressive that made me get goosebumps in many parts. Generally, all the lyrics of the album are of high standards and match to its dark aesthetics. High quality lyrics demand high quality music to embrace them. I put the CD on the CD-player and the brain orgasm that I felt by their combination persuaded me that the music totally corresponds to the lyrics. The structure of the tracks seemed quite complicated to me, I had to listen to them a lot of times in order to fully understand it. Complicated for me yes, but for sure not tiring or overloaded, these musicians know exactly what they do in order to keep the flame of your interest alive. Every new time that I listen to this album I discover something that I hadn't noticed on my previous listenings and I think that this fact will make it interesting even for the most demanding listeners out there. The more this album grows in me, the more I like it. The atmosphere of the whole album is dark and ritualistic. I had the great idea to listen to the instrumental "The Arrow of Time" as a background sound on a full moon night alone at an isolated place in nature where only goats and maybe other unknown creatures live, surrounded by mountains and the endlessness of the dark sky and the sea,  in order to live a numinous experience...I think that my heartbeat touched 200bpm that night...

The album made by perfectionists-high level musicians who seem to be in a very mature state of creation has no filler-songs: every song seems to have been carefully chosen with the unique criterion just to sound perfect. Maybe, personally, I was a little more touched by Blackest Orthodoxy Perpetuated, the Breath of the Beast and Transformation into a Celestial Ghoul, but if you ask me again in 10 years I may choose differently.

The surreal artwork (made by Frater Teth), dark as well with an intellectual "touch" at the same time, perfectly matches the atmosphere of the album. I am not in the artist's head to know exactly what he had in his mind when he created it, but I found it interesting trying to figure out its meaning and symbolism. It also reminded me of the level with the scary flying heads of "Prince of Persia 2", one of my favorite PC games in the early 90s, and this is one more reason why I liked it.

In a few words, Entropy Dynamics,  the 6th album by Embrace of Thorns that was released by NUCLEAR WINTER RECORDS in 2022 on CD, LP, Tape, is a great album made by a great band. I already consider it as a very special piece of my collection. Highly recommended!!!

By Vinyl Mint.

EMBRACE OF THORNS CONTACT:

https://www.facebook.com/EmbraceOfThorns

https://www.instagram.com/embraceofthorns_official

https://embracethorns.bandcamp.com/

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1EtultnvSVx3JPfVqmrnha