Band:	Ershetu
Album:	Yomi
Style:	Black metal, Folk metal, Progressive metal
Release date:	November 08, 2024
A review by:	musclassia

01. Ketsurui
02. Jikoku
03. Sekiryō
04. Abikyōkan
05. Kagutsuchi
06. Nenokatasukuni

From one continent onto another, Ershetu’s exploration of world death culture rendered through folk black metal goes from strength to strength.

The initial concept for Ershetu, a project driven by Debemur Morti Productions founder and band lyricist Void in collaboration with composer Sacr, was a particularly intriguing one; each album planned for the project would explore a different civilization and its conceptions of death. Xibalba, their debut release last year, focused on Mesoamerican themes, incorporating New World pipes, flutes and drones to accompany a blackened metallic core. The album shone partly due to the strength of the concept and the band’s rendition of it, but also thanks to the presence of Borknagar/Solefald’s Lazare on vocals, alongside Vindsval (Blut Aus Nord) on bass and guitar. A year later, album number two Yomi takes listeners across the Pacific Ocean to the land of the rising sun.

For this foray into Japanese Shinto, Sacr and Void are not joined by Lazare, but Vindsval continues his collaboration with Ershetu and even expands upon it by also taking on vocal duties. I’m not sufficiently acquainted with the entire Blut Aus Nord discography to know whether Vindsval has previously made use of clean vocals there, but if the snippets of singing and choral arrangements on songs such as “Jikoku” and “Sekiryō” are performed by him, his singing voice is perfectly serviceable, albeit mixed rather distantly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, harsh vocals take a more leading role this time around.

On the folk instrumentation front, things have shifted from Xibalba as well; while there are some woodwind parts across the album, the most frequently used traditional Japanese instruments are stringed, such as the koto and shamisen. These are present for a large proportion of the album’s runtime, although there is variation between them having more leading roles (such as in several bits in opener “Ketsurui”) versus serving as secondary accompaniment adding an extra flourish to the meloblack core of the likes of “Sekiryō”. To hear additional instruments, there’s a growing swell of arrangements in the latter minutes of “Abikyōkan” and “Nenokatasukuni” that becomes increasingly kaleidoscopic in its variety.

As far as the black metal part of the equation is concerned, there is some range across Yomi, from moments of harsher aggression to more melodic fare, as well as sections that veer closer to blackgaze (the sections in “Abikyōkan” and “Nenokatasukuni” mentioned in the last paragraph are prime examples of this). “Ketsurui”, following its folkish opening, is more grounded in melody-tinged atmospheric black metal, while “Jikoku” and “Sekiryō” generally opt for a more classic meloblack approach, albeit with flashes of darker, more intense attacks. The second half of “Kagutsuchi” arguably has some of the most extreme metal on the album, but this is preceded by an elongated passage dedicated solely to Japanese folk instrumentation and percussion to provide balance.

As a whole, Yomi lacks slightly in the way of memorability when compared with Xibalba, but its strength is arguably more in the atmosphere crafted by the coalescence of the traditional instruments and the harsher metal, and it’s a fusion that pays off well for Ershetu. The blow-by-blow is reliably entertaining, with some genuine moments of eerie malevolence at times (such as in the early minutes of “Abikyōkan”, but when the grander parts of the album arrive, it elevates the experience to another level. Overall, it reminds me somewhat of Vengeful Spectre’s debut (albeit with Japanese rather than Chinese roots), but the execution on Yomi outshines Vengeful Spectre a tad for me.