Review: Vow of Thorns “Farewell To The Sun”

Vow of Thorns “Farewell To The Sun”
Forest Dweller Inc.

If you are afraid to break your stereotypes about black-metal genre and its various offshoots, you should go a mile out of your way  to avoid the debut full-length album Farewell To The Sun from Canadian band Vow of Thorns, which will be released on their own label! Eclecticism – is the basis of this creation.

Farewell To The Sun‘s style determination is a thankless task, so lets confine ourselves with the fact that the general features are related to black and doom with the prefix «atmospheric».

Canadians have used all the achievements of scene colleagues, from heavy-metal to the black metal guild. The album, which is scheduled for release on July, 15 has six songs, each one is distinctive and unique. Though, it’s cannot be said about the cover: Farewell To The Sun used typical color, blurred silhouette and mood. However, the used font is very strange for a metal album at all. Lyrics are also quite typical for black metal, their main themes are despair and feelings of insecurity.

Listening to the album from the first song “Meeting On The Astral Plane”, released in March 2016 as the first single, I wondered, how they could combine almost major hard rock sound, stoner clean guitar sound, Iron Maiden’s galloping with an instant jump to painful, viscous black metal or even doom sound? Surprisingly, it was given  them easily and well! Vocals are just very pleased: cold as ice crack, scalding as if the pain of hands pierced by thorns.

The second song called “Great Abomination” is a black-metal in all its grandeur. Like every song from album it can be a great soundtrack to contemplation of the sea in its various states. Specifically, the second song is associated with violent storm that moves natural to calmness of the third song “Farewell To The Sun Part I”. The song contains three parts: first of them is the shortest song in the whole album (4:28). This instrumental composition flows smoothly to an  album’s apogee song – “Farewell To The Sun Part II”. The third part, marked with especially trance and psychedelic melody and rhythm, exemplifies heavy doom sound.

The most distinguished album’s song, which pointed out by musicians themselves, is the last one – “Doomed Woods”. And I can not pass it: this majestic 12-minute song in good old doom-metal, which is going faster sometimes and gives a little rest from the stretching main theme, but in the end it is slowed down again almost to the limits of musical possibilities!

So, what or who encouraged musicians to write this stuff? I just thought about Agaloch, musicians in the interview also mentioned them often. Along with Agaloch, Vow of Thorns called as inspire bands Canadian Woods of Ypres, Norwegian Ulver and Ukrainian Drudkh.

So we are waiting for release, which has everything in terms of genre and sensual diversity. Let the black and white cover don’t make you expect only duality from the album. Farewell To The Sun has more facets than listener can imagine!