Band:	Au-Dessus
Album:	End Of Chapter
Style:	Black metal, Post-metal
Release date:	May 19, 2017
A review by:	BitterCOld

01. VI
02. VII
03. VIII
04. IX
05. X
06. XI
07. XII (End Of Chapter)

The mysterious, shrouded Lithuanians of Au-Dessus blast forth VII tunes of evocative black metal with enough post-influence to keep things intriguing.

End Of Chapter album picks up where their self-titled left off. At least numerically, not sure about sonically as this is my first exposure to them. The last track on the EP was V, so naturally this album opens with VI. Imagine this form of nomenclature will get increasingly confusing the longer they churn out the tunes.

While Au-Dessus seems to be tagged as Post-Black 'round the web, with End Of Chapter Black is clearly the engine which powers this sonic vehicle, and this is a good thing. You have ominous riffing, tension building riffs employed within slowly developing songs (such as VI, the opener), full on thundering blasturabation as the basic framework for song construction and album flow. While these elements are found in all sorts of black metal, with Au-Dessus they are particularly well executed and arranged which keeps the release intriguing from start to finish rather than have a 'color by numbers' vibe you could get from less skilled musicians.

While having some knuckle-dragging, bash their instruments as fast and hard as possible moments, the pieces are a more cerebral listen, which is why I enjoyed spinning the album once or twice a day for the last week yet still struggle to adequately describe the tunes. It's almost to an extent like using black metal pieces within post-metal thematic flow for song composition.
On top of this you've got a whole bunch of other flavors interwoven within. While there are plenty of throat-shredding rasped and howled vocals, you've others stages where it seems throat-singing is utilized and on the opener, around the five minute mark, the vocal approach reminds me of an old Gene Loves Jezebel tape I owned in the mid-80s.

So if anything about this mishmash of a description makes you pause and think, "Yeah, I should probably check this out", do it.

If this is the End Of Chapter, I can't wait for the rest of the book.