Review by Sonny for One of Nine - Eternal Sorcery (2023)

I felt compelled to check out Eternal Sorcery after hearing the track "The Silence of Heaven" on The North monthly playlist and enjoying it massively. One of Nine are a Tolkien-obsessed, US four-piece with names such as Pharazon the Golden and Gurthang the Black Sword who play a modern and melodic style of black metal, but thankfully, despite the silly names and fantasy-based concepts, they don't succumb to the cringeworthy cheesiness often associated with such elements and if you didn't know anything about them or read the lyrics you wouldn't guess that was what they were about. The album is quite brief, it's eight tracks running for less than 35 minutes and it is very proficiently put together. As there is little to no information available on the band, I have no idea if they are a brand new unit or a band of seasoned professionals, but they certainly sound like they know their way around the black metal block.

The songwriting is excellent, with riffs that are at once darkly vicious and memorably melodic whilst the atmospheric elements the band use are artfully deployed. Aside from a short ambient intro the synths are very subtlely applied and the folk elements only appear relatively briefly, with a gentle acoustic guitar ending to the otherwise furious savagery of "The Silence of Heaven", a lute-like plucked intro to "Moonlit Sacrifice" and another short acoustic piece, "Wrathful Rebirth", providing an interlude before the epic intensity of the album's closer and longest track, "A Hunter Rides The Night". Though brief, these gentle interludes and intros do a great job of providing contrast and context for the heaviness and aggression of the band's black metal without overdoing it. Alongside this there is also a degree of variation of pacing throughout the album with the band unafraid to drop the tempo occasionally, such as in the middle section of "God Chain", both of these techniques preventing the tracks from merging into predictability.

The production is very modern, with almost absolute clarity, providing the guitars with a bell-like quality which, alongside the cymbal crashes gives the sound a sharp edge, whilst also providing a nice depth that allows the bass and drums to anchor the riffs with a really solid foundation. The vocals are of the washed out, as-if-from-a-distance shrieks and howls variety, adding a dispiriting and cheerless aspect to the album's overarching atmosphere that references the hopelessness of those opposing the great evils the lyrics expound upon. Technically the band are exceedingly competent and tight-knit and sound like they have been playing together for years.

Overall, this is a fantastic slice of melodic black metal which reaches back to influences such as Dissection and Emperor and which is polished and savage, professional and visceral and scratches all my modern black metal itches.