Style: Atmospheric black/doom metal
Primary Emotions/Themes: A ritual to come into contact with the dark spirits of nature
Thoughts: I hated this album when it first released. The shaman chanting at the beginning was a huge turn off for me and I stopped the album almost immediately, shelved it and gave up on it for years. How could this possibly be the follow up to Blood Vaults? This tarnished the entire legacy of the band.
It took me a long time before I was willing to revisit the album. I know that it was an overreaction to the introduction, but man that really was not a good start for me. After finally getting the nerve back to listen I found that after the atrocious introduction there was actually a strong album hidden beneath. The hellish atmosphere that was in the previous albums was still here, just it had changed. This was the band's second huge shift in style.
Instead of songs focused on creating an impossibly evil soundscape, these were focused on creating a ritual type atmosphere. The songs were a tribal in nature, the rhythms created to induce a trance rather than fear. Once I learned to embrace this rather than fight it Exuvia became a much more enjoyable album. It's not nearly as good as the ones that came before it, but it still manages to live up to the standard the band set on the previous albums.
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