Midnight Odyssey
Shards of Silver Fate

Sounds fascinating with a midnight odyssey, taking me on a journey through the shards of silver fate. And it also looks fascinating when looking at the cover artwork that follows this midnight odyssey, like something from a storybook and something from a world very alien to our eyes. Maybe not so alien to the man behind it all, it is a one-man project, which is something of a worry I think. More worrying however, is the enormous playing time and the fact that the label speaks of the first album from a few years back is a cult album and those kind of things that are usually connected with really bad black metal vomit. Now, I am not one to judge by press sheets and cover art so I have spend many hours listening to this album in order to form myself an informed opinion about it.

Musically it is rooted in the black metal/doom metal genre but takes off from there into several different musical areas. It is an album where the atmosphere is the main focal point, it is a dramatic adventure through mostly dark places, the void of space feels present, death is another strong presence but also rebirth, warmth and hope. It is like a storybook in musical form, dramatic and deep as well as exciting and interesting. The production is mainly good, the black metal parts feel a bit tame perhaps but the clear vocals are really well performed and the parts feel well puzzled together. I think that this guy manages to bring out his vision fairly well.

However, there is an elephant in the room concerning the album and that is the massive playing time because there is no way to claim that 142 minutes isn’t a significant amount of time – that is longer than most movies. And it is about a tenth of a day, and more than a third of most people’s free time, that is an album that demands a fair bit of your time, especially considering that you will probably need to play it more than once to really get into it. And that raises the question about who this album is aimed at, the black metal crowd is usually more simple minded than this, maybe the doom crowd or something in that region – I doubt that there is an audience that will make the creator rich.

That doesn’t mean that the album is bad, I kind of like it. I dislike how it requires so much of the time I don’t have and I really doubt that I will ever play this album again now that I am done with it. It has been an interesting journey through it and it brought about a really cool idea for me but nevertheless, it is not really an album I can afford the time to play as it is longer than most of my car journeys and in my working time I need to review stuff and as my free time is very limited I don’t think there is a place for this album and unfortunately I think that this can be held as true for many people in the world.

With all songs being 14 minutes or longer and three of them being over 20 minutes long it is hard to pick a favourite song as there is so much going on in each of the tracks and it is hard to claim that any of them are aimed at radio time. I think the album is best as a whole anyway and if you are a patient person and have too much time on your hand, this will probably be the perfect album for you but unfortunately most people today have too little time and not enough attention span to appreciate what this album has to offer.

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