@San I'm glad! Black metal is a genre that's really, really misunderstood (even by the people that create it) so I'm happy to help others learn about what should be like.
@Sally You should, and I hope you like it. Summoning has some more fantastic ambient/synth tracks that start from there.
@Hoglorfen Another Summoning fan! I agree with everything you said, though Dol Guldur holds a very special place in my heart. Oathbound represents them at the peak of their creativity.
And now, without further ado...
Minas Morgul
Sophomore albums can fall into two categories. They can either the album that a band finds their stride with, their sound if you will, or they can be a muddled mess of half formed ideas that the band can’t decide on. For Summoning, the second album was either going to set them apart from the massive amounts of the hum drum of black metal being created from a cookie cutter lay out or it was going to forever mire them in mediocrity and relegate them to a footnote. Lugburz was a fine album, but fine is not what Summoning wanted. They wanted to be set apart from the rest of their colleges. Would Minas Morgul be that album for them? Minas Morgul recently celebrated it’s 25th anniversary, which adds a layer of complexity to the review.
Does Minas Morgul succeed? The answer is complicated, unfortunately. That wasn’t a set up for a question that was going to go unanswered. Minas Morgul is like an awkward teenager. It’s halfway between being a child and an adult but doesn’t belong in either category. It’s a gangly mess of arms and legs that has tons of potential but can’t quite get out of its own way. For this release, they dropped their drummer, becoming the two piece they have remained for the last 25 years. From Minas Morgul onward, Silenus and Protector used programmed drums, specifically tom toms and kettle drums, to compliment their sound. This alone is one of the big things that separates and distinguishes Summoning as a band. Being a studio only band (they don’t and never will perform live) this allowed the two to expand their repertoire of instruments and experimentation. Unfortunately for Minas Morgul, there’s a little too much experimentation going on. Silenus and Protector use a lot of synth in this album. A lot of synth. It’s a proto dungeon synth album one could almost say. In 1995 the melding of keyboards with guitars, bass, and drum hadn’t really been achieved. Minas Morgul was a step in that direction, a bold and brave attempt, but in many ways it didn’t so much blend them as mush them together and wrap the whole thing in glue. Sometimes the synth is heavy within the song, dominating everything else, other times it creates a barely noticeable melody. To borrow from some experiences I’ve had with baking to make a metaphor, Summoning used too much flour in one song, then too much sugar, then not enough, then forgot the baking soda.
That being said, despite the flaws of Minas Morgul, this is a fantastic album. It is a marked improvement over Lugburz in both style and substance. With Minas Morgul, they ceased to be another run of the mill black metal band pumping out the same crap for the next twenty years (believe me, there are still bands trying to recreate the bad, lo-fi sounds of the Norwegian Black Metal scene and it’s so annoying). They began forging their own path. Indeed, the sounds that were born on Minas Morgul forged a pathway to a new subgenre within the genre: Atmospheric Black Metal. The sounds of atmospheric black metal are much more refined than the parent genre, richer and more vibrant. I believe in my previous incarnation of Resounding Footsteps I used the word cavernous over and over again to describe the sound. It’s lush, but raw; it has an echoing feeling that gives the listener a feeling of being surrounded.
Narratively speaking, the album is still all over the place. No matter where I look, I can’t really find a thread that leads from one song to the next. From what I can tell, this will be a thing with Summoning up and through their latest album, With Doom We Come. Everything is a mishmash of Tolkien references and cool medieval tropes. Not that any of that is bad, mind you. Summoning also use a lot more instrumental tracks on Minas Morgul than they do on any of their other albums, interspaced very strategically between the longer tracks (one tracks clocks in a ten minutes and another at nine) to give the listener some breathing room to digest the music. Yes, I said digest. Summoning can be a lot to take in, owing to the scope of the sounds they create so a multitude of instrumental tracks work.
There’s certainly no requirement for an album to have a narrative flow but it is something I look for in my music. Music, to me, is meant to take me out of my current world and place in another. Even if that world is exactly the same as the old one but with the edges sharpened, the aggressive tone ramped up, it’s still something different. Music is as much a transport as it is an enhancement. Doing one or the other is good, doing both is transcendent. Minas Morgul is a great listening experience.
One I highly recommend. You will be able to see the seeds planted that become mighty oaks twenty-five years down the line. The standout tracks on the album are the first two. The opening track, Soul Wandering, is a brilliant progression from Grey Heavens. It’s not just an old school synth track with some water added for atmosphere. It’s a synthetic orchestra of sound. It gets a little bombastic at the end but still fantastic, a great indicator of things to come. Lugburz, the next track (confusingly not on the album of the same name) is a surprisingly short seven minutes filled with layered melodies, and disparate instruments all working together. Going back to the cookie analogy, this is the perfect cookie, the flour, the sugar, the baking soda, it’s all here. This is what Summoning is capable of, this is the sound they need to be build on. Will they? Find out when I take a look at their next: Dol Guldur.
Super pumped for you to get back to doing something for which you so clearly have great passion, and it's an honor that you'll be sharing your analyses with us here!
