Review by Sonny for Yith - Dread (2016)

Yith is a solo artist playing a hybrid of black and doom metal and "dread" was the project's debut full-length album (the album title should properly be all in lower case). Blackened doom metal has become more prevalent in the last decade or so, but a number of it's practitioners, such as The Flight of Sleipnir, are really doom metal bands using certain tropes from black metal, such as shrieking vocals and the odd temolo riff, while others will play a black metal section, then a slower, doom metal section and essentially alternate between the two, whereas Yith produce a genuine seamless melding of black and doom metal. This manifests as tracks that, in the main, follow doom metal pacing, although faster, blastbeat-driven sections rear their heads from time to time with a more significant bottom end than is present in most black metal, with the bass in particular having a decided prominence in the mix. on top of this a lot, in fact most, of the guitar work consists of tremolo riffs, even during the predominant doom sections and the vocals are strictly black metal derived howls and shrieks. This makes for a particularly bleak atmosphere with the melancholy of doom metal being accentuated by the icy frostiness of the black metal component, indeed "dread" is well-named.

The opener, "time and loss" is probably the most recognisably black metal track, opening up with a withering blackened onslaught, before hinting at things to come with a slower doom-laden middle section. For me, the duo of tracks that is the title track and "centuries of horror" are really where it's at with "dread". Following another trope common in black metal, a short, folky interlude called "remembrance", the title track oozes it's way into your concsciousness with an epic and ominous main riff that calls on all the decayed monumental majesty that doom metal atmospherics can muster. When this is coupled with Yith's demonic snarls then a special atmosphere is created that would certainly be at home as the backdrop to one of Lovecraft's tales of existential dread. Great though "dread" is, the next track "centuries of horror" is even better for my money. With a most epically monumental riff and ritualistic drumming it reaches back into primal depths and ancestral fears of the horrors of the unknown and the majesty and dangers of the natural world and is a towering paeon to man's deepest-seated fears.

The songs in general are well-constructed with a nice flow to the songwriting and Yith demonstrates a more than capable grasp of his instrumentation, at least to my uneducated ears. Overall, "dread" is a well put together and mature amalgamation of two distinct styles of metal from which Yith has fashioned an identity of his own and should appeal to anyone looking for a fresh fix of quality extreme doom that yet yearns for something a little different by someone who inherently understands the genre.