Band:	Shroud Of Despondency
Album:	Pine
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	March 01, 2012
A review by:	Doc G.

01. Wanderlust (Winged Seed In The Breeze)
02. Overshadow
03. New Trees
04. Wanderlust (Moist Soil)
05. The Great Sadness Descends
06. Half Open Gates
07. Wanderlust (Seedling)
08. Light Words, Dark Graves
09. Nameless End
10. Wanderlust (Lightning Precedes Fire)
11. Unchaining Of An Animal

The generic meets the distinctive. That basically sums up Shroud Of Despondency's Pine. It's a confusing album to try and wrap your head around...Not for any experimental reasons, mind you. It's an album that seems to utilize fairly generic black metal moments to strengthen the effectively dark, brooding moments.

To get your head around this idea, try something new; instead of listening to it straight through, try first browsing through the songs fast-forwarding to random moments. You'll stumble across that cascading black metal most associated with Wolves In The Throne Room most frequently, but also a lot of these slightly more ambient, and occasionally synth'd-out passages. Now go back and listen from start to finish. It's interesting to see how Pine's quality is entirely dependant on context. Taken at face value, the individual segments are fairly hum-drum. Tie everything together and it's a pretty strong black metal album.

Then there are the few songs that are boring no matter how you go about listening to it. There are very few tracks where it strictly sticks to this unoriginal black metal for extended periods of time, but when it does, it's painfully dry. You've also got these prog riff changes that come in from time to time...They aren't necessarily bad in their own right, but they don't really do anything but hinder the flow of the music. These prog moments tend to give certain pieces a really incongruous feel, and not in any real pleasant surprise type of way, but just sounding irrelevant.

Pine is a good or bad black metal album depending on how you approach it. From start-to-finish, it's definitely a well thought-out recording for the most part. If you're looking for individual songs to grab you, I suggest looking elsewhere.