Band:	Raventale
Album:	Bringer Of Heartsore
Style:	Atmospheric black metal, Doom metal
Release date:	November 15, 2011
A review by:	BitterCOld

01. Anything Is Void
02. Twilight, The Vernal Dusk
03. These Days Of Sorrow
04. Breathing The Scent Of Death
05. Prologue - Sailing To Further
06. The Last Afterglow Burned
07. Detachment And Solitude
08. Epilogue - Alone With Heartsore

Bringer Of Heartsore marks the fifth release by Raventale, a one-man black metal project hailing from Ukraine.

The music is still basically midpaced tempo black metal that shows the influence some other Ukrainian black metal band with which you might be familiar... Dude? Hey Drudkh? Drudkh Looks Like A Lady? You get the idea.

If you read my review of After you might be experiencing deja vu right about now. Yes, this review starts off mighty similarly to the last one, only with me showing off even more Drudkh puns, because this album is mighty similar to the last one.

This time around the album features 40 minutes and the Drudkh (still) abides.

Everything is well done, of course. The songs build, ebb, and flow. The guitar tone, and thus overall tone of each song is warm and fuzzy. There are (less) of those temporary forays into ambient country, where most of the components fall away leading to slightly drifting passages. Perhaps the tracks just seem slightly better executed and polished with this outing, and perhaps slightly more focused, as result of cutting down on the mellow mood time.

As a result, it is just more of the same, really. I liked their last album. I like this one. It didn't set my world on fire, won't rocket to the upper reaches of my "Best of 2011" charts or anything, and isn't blazing any new trails for the band or the genre in general. He had a tried and tr00 formula last go around and he is continuing to tinker with it this go as well. Some bands engage in such a path and find a way to improve upon it with each release, as in Bolt Thrower. Other bands just seem to tinker with it slightly and grow increasingly stale, such as BT's "kissing cousins" from the Florida DM movement, Obituary.

With this release, it seems the differences are minimal and Raventale are just "treading water" as it were. Nothing ventured, nothing gained... but nothing lost, either.

All in all a good release and a decent listen.