Review by Vinny for Great Sea, The - Noble Art of Desolation (2025)

German black metal duo, The Great Sea are relative newcomers to the scene (at least in this guise). They play a turgid style of black metal that lurches its way along, its feet getting the occasional application of atmosphere and ‘post’ section as their only balm on this at times laborious journey. The vocals deploy a pagan style that works well against the musical backdrop, and as a complete package, this debut album does display an obvious degree of maturity in the performances

Where the album does fall short though is in the memorability stakes. I must be on my tenth listen through of the record now, and whilst certain elements are bedding in, they only seem to become familiar in the immediate moment they occur. I feel this maybe because the album creates too much space for itself, certainly more than it can fill on a consistent and interesting basis. A pattern quickly forms of atmospheric and ‘post’ sections being bridged by more aggressive passages, which is a logical order to be ran. However, over the duration of the whole album, the knock-on effect of this is a sense that the message the duo intends to deliver simply takes too long to arrive.

It would be unkind to refer to Noble Art of Desolation as meandering yet structurally speaking tracks do appear to outstay their welcome. Whilst I could not call out any bad tracks, equally there is a shortage of overall direction to most of the tracks here. We should keep in mind that this is debut release of course, and maybe that level of maturity I called out earlier on in the review has me expecting more compositional aptitude than I get. Still though, I cannot fight the fact that the record falls more than a little short of where it could be.