Band:	Vemod
Album:	The Deepening
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	January 2024

01. Mot Oss, En Ild
02. Der Guder Dør
03. True North Beckons
04. Fra Drømmenes Bok I
05. Inn I Lysende Natt
06. The Deepening

The darkest months have passed by, and the days are quickly getting longer again. Somewhere in between, you'll find Vemod’s dreamy, gazing black metal evoking the sense of the December clouds dissipating and the Sun’s rays once more shining into your eyes, but it still being pretty damn dark.

From the echoing fjords and roaring sea of central Norway, Vemod (Melancholy) brings a bunch of desolate yet majestic tunes with ambitious scope. The band released their debut album way back in 2012, so this second effort has been a long time coming. It is probably not very helpful to regard The Deepening in the context of a band that has had over a decade to gather new influences, hone its skills, and develop its style, so let's forget about that for now and see what this new album has to offer.

Norway is a sparsely populated land full of desolate wilderness, long and lonely mountain roads, and raging waves, which is encapsulated in Vemod’s music. A few listens at this, and you'll soon get a sense of why black metal was first developed in this rugged part of the world. After a short intro, “Der Guder Dør” (Where Gods Die) leaps out at you with unrelenting blast beats behind drawn-out chord progressions and soaring lead melodies that bring to mind a more stripped-down (or down to earth, if you prefer) Alcest, being contemplating rather than ferocious and haunting rather than destroying. This is the kind of music which finds a pattern that seems to work well, and then goes on to play that for minutes on end at times. Only after about 7 minutes (which is perhaps 1 or 2 too many) does the 13 minute long song change shape and quiet down into ambience, martial drums and, eventually, solemn choirs. The song as a whole, however, goes by faster than you'd expect from the prolonged runtime and makes the band's lofty ambitions perfectly clear.

In fact, only four of these six tracks are actual songs, giving you an idea of the general runtime of each. Unsurprisingly, as it goes, the shortest and most condensed song (at roughly 7 minutes) is also the most engaging: the instrumental “Inn I Lysande Natt” (Into Shining Night) builds on a mid-paced, echoing lead guitar that progressively gets supported by twangy, gothic country guitars in Wild West-meets-Trondheim fashion, and is a quite unique and surprising piece of music. I wouldn't mind if Vemod had taken this concept further, because while the other songs are well written and emotional enough, they're of the sort that I would expect when listening to something best described as atmospheric blackgaze.

The title track clocks in at 16 minutes and features clean singing, ethereal chord progressions, rasping screams, bouncy bass, and, well, lots of ideas through its many dynamic shifts, but is slightly marred by its own ambition. As you might have guessed, that's a nice way to say it's too long; even though all the various sections are engaging enough, a little trim wouldn't have hurt. Only a few bands can get away with writing songs of such length, and Moonsorrow this ain't.

Potential for self-editing aside, The Deepening is an evocative, beautiful piece of what I'd like to call “serene black metal”, blending melodic black, blackgaze and ambience into a good whole that come through great in its handcrafted-sounding production, and gets a bonus point for the fabulous “Inn I Lysande Natt”. It's out 19 January on Prophecy Productions.