It ought to go without saying at this point that out of all the issues that the vast underground of metal music suffers from, one of the most prominent has got to be oversaturation. It’s one thing for there to be loads of competition with it oftentimes being a good thing, but a dense population without any sort of progress or even a mild sense of moving forward can all too easily result in an overwhelming feeling of stagnation. In particular, black metal suffers from that with there being legions of bands that don’t really bring all that much to the table even if they’re going for a specific vibe. However, by no means does that equate to there being no new interesting talent that can still deliver greatness for the sound without seeking to reinvent it. As a brilliant example of such, there are those that can learn much from the debut of Mossystone.
A creative mind is not one that can easily sit in one place for too long. For some, that means creating a lot of music of a particular vein and really going all-in with multiple releases in hardly any time whatsoever. For others, that means exploration outside the boundaries of where they started to find new horizons to satisfy their desire for something different. Having already tapped into death-doom with his other project, Trimarkisia, it’s now with Mossystone that we see this explorative mastermind create another one-man act with this time being distinctly different for it resides in the realm of atmospheric black metal. Normally, such a transition would warrant a few missteps here or there as the talent in question still finds stable footing in a different sound. Throughout the entirety of “Paysages Tristes”, Mossystone had no such trouble. Rather, Mossystone already comes to us with the energy and command of the genre likened to that of an undeniable master. This is a profound example of the genre being given extreme justice with it likely being one of the most engaging and captivating works that the sound has brought before me for quite some time.
Not just content to keep things mildly atmospheric, it’s with the injection of tremendous rhythms and melodies built off strong themes of strife, longing, and suffering even amidst the godly majesty of the natural world that Mossystone stands tall with these five tracks offering us magnificence the likes of which this genre is not treated to nearly often enough. Feeling more like a pilgrimage to something far-off but hopefully better than where you started out from, “Paysages Tristes” allows your burdens and your struggles to gain dominance while never enabling them to prevent you from moving forward. They still linger, but in the face of a vast gorge or a monolithic mountain range, these songs of solitude and anguish, where the wind is our only companion, show us something far greater than ourselves. That’s something so much of atmospheric black metal attempts to tap into countless times in any given year, yet it is here that Mossystone shows us how it’s done in stupendous form.
This is the kind of entrance that many bands can only ever dream of. Having already shown what it can do in a different genre, the mastermind behind Mossystone has quickly established himself as a tour de force the likes of which the purveyors of the underground would do well to take heed of. “Paysages Tristes” is nothing if not a powerful piece right from the beginning. You must only allow its soundscapes to wash over you as the leaves turn and the seasons change, but the soul still profoundly suffers in a way that somehow feels ever so right.
LISTEN to “Paysages Tristes” on Bandcamp here.
Mossystone does not have any sort of social media that I could find, so please follow the band via its Bandcamp page to stay up to date on the band’s future releases.