Fuath - II (2021)^{Release ID: 26390}

The mornings are getting colder, there's an early autumn chill in the air most days and the atmospheric black metal rotation appears to just grow and grow in October in the Vinny cave.  Wait a minute though?  Andy Marshall of Falloch and Saor fame has a sophomore album out under the banner of his Fuath project (I have never heard the debut) so this would be a perfect fit for this time of year to tag onto the queue of atmospheric bm, right?

In truth, whilst atmospherics do play a key part in Fuath's sound, this album has a lot more to do with conventional black metal.  It is full of blast beats and ghastly shrieking vocals, whist also having a mining tremolo to the riffs (check out album opener Prophecies as evidence of such), all hallmarks of the cold and harsh fury of the authentic black metal genre.  This isn't to say that the keyboards are redundant here.  They are audible and effective still, albeit in a more supporting role than you would initially perhaps expect from a man responsible for the melodic exuberance of Saor.  Into the Forest of Shadows is the track on here that best showcases the atmospherics at play.  Here the keyboards take more of a central role and drive a lot of what is going on around them to great effect.  It is still an up-tempo and aggressive though and the album as whole maintains this consistency.

The fact is though that after repeated listens the album gets more than a bit blurry, morphing into stages of a similar sound as opposed to developing on a theme over five tracks.  In a way it misses out on utilising the atmospherics better, even if only to provide some variety.  It is memorable, but for the wrong reasons really as it just feels like Saor have toned down one aspect of their sound and gone a little harsher in another and all balance is somehow lost in the mix.

The short format makes this "samey" aspect more tolerable than if we had eight to ten tracks of this to contend with but I would suggest that Fuath's longevity is not the lengthiest prospect in my music library.