22 July 2024
Confining music into darkness or darkness into music? It’s hard to tell which one Akhlys are trying to do. However, what certain is that here is a pitch-black set of sounds.
Akhlys is a band who started their career making dark ambient. I missed those days of the band because I’m not into that kind of stuff. But I am one of the members of that lucky minority to witness the progression of the band since their second (but first black metal) album The Dreaming I.
Kyle Earl Spanswick, whom we know with the Naas Alcameth moniker, is an extremely productive musician. He is a person who has been in tons of bands and has done great work with Aoratos, Bestia Arcana, Nightbringer and Excommunion apart from Akhlys.
The dark buzz inherited from the “dark ambient” times of the band never stops in their music. For example, Black Geminus, the album’s only instrumental song, makes me dream of a dark swarm of insects. This army makes the sky buzz with the sound they make as they move, and completely closes the sky and prevents the sun from being seen, leaving the earth in darkness.
Akhlys is introduced as a black metal band. However, like the previous two albums, they also carry traces of death metal from time to time. The music was composed in such a way that the closest description that would suit the resulting music is “black metal”. As he had done in his previous albums, Kyle preferred to write songs of 7 minutes or more in length. Even the album’s approximately 12-minute introductory song is an indication of how independent the guy acts, how he tries to make the music he feels inside, and how he does not have an attitude that takes people’s tastes into consideration in the first place. He composed the songs primarily for himself, acted with the motto that art is for art’s sake, and created his music on the basis of this principle.
The album, which bears similarities with the previous two albums, still contains minor changes and continues to evolve within the universe it succeeds to create. It is obvious that there would be no goal of creating a hit song in such music, but still there are also songs that stand out with their catchiness, such as ”Maze of Phobetor” and “Sister Silence, Brother Sleep”. The album, which I think is very successful as a whole, allows us to feel the spritual darkness in our bones. I suppose, there won’t be a more sinister, darker work this year. Special music for special ears. I assure you.
9/10
