Style: Intense melodic black metal
Primary Emotions/Themes: Being lost in a forest, feeling like you're walking in circles, only to be blind sided by a vicious animal from time to time
Thoughts: I really want to love this album. I've forced myself to listen to it more than I want to admit. Everything is here for me to love. The riffs are intense (holy shit are they intense), the melodies are intricate and interesting, the drums pummel me into the ground. All of this are ingredients to an album that I absolutely should love...
Triade I: Eos is the third album from Aara and it marks another shift in direction for the band. This is the album where they would solidify their sound moving onwards... at least for the next two albums. The band has once again doubled down on the melodic portion of their art, and moved even further away from the enticing atmosphere of the debut album.
The band continues to make their music more intense, the melodies cut razor sharp and never fail to impress with their diversity and ferocity. There is something that seems missing though. I should l o v e this music, I should be all over it.... but I can't seem to get into this album.
Sure there are points where I stand up and go "that's what I'm fucking talking about." These moments are incredible: the acoustic break in Fathum, that insane riff at the end of Naufragus, the incredible buzzsaw riff followed by chants in Nimmermehr. They all make me stop in my tracks and take it in... but then there is the rest of the album... especially the first half.
The last riff in Nimmermerhr is fucking insane, but everything leading up to it is pretty boring and loses my interest about half way through the song. Almost all of Tantalusqual is a blur to me. It's intense and kicks my ass... but it's also boring. Even the inclusion of chants doesn't really do much for me. The melodies don't catch my attention. The progressions sound like a million other songs... it's boring.
During this writing I'm seeing that this is only truly a problem with the second and third tracks. That does turn into a larger problem though because that's a third of the album. With six tracks total, every one of them needs to be memorable... even with one dud it's hard to justify the album as a whole. Aara struggles with this on Eos.
The rest of the album does try to make up for this with some incredible melodies and memorable moments. It has more variety than the first two albums, but ultimately it falls short. Don't get me wrong its not an objectively bad album, it just does not meet the expectations set by the first two.
Written April 19th 2024.
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