Band:	Pulsar Colony
Album:	Cosmic Manifestations
Style:	Ambient black metal, Avantgarde black metal, Experimental black metal
Release date:	January 12, 2015
A review by:	Auntie Sahar

01. The Intoxicating Wine Of The Allfather
02. The Inner Core
03. Protection Of The Hammer
04. The Dimensional Wolf Of The Ginnungagap Singularity
05. Drifting Into Oblivion

I love nontraditional black metal. I also love one man bands. This year, Pulsar Colony is helping me kill two birds with one stone.

The offspring of Charles Sabo, Pulsar Colony is the type of one man band that sits right on that interesting edge between staying in familiar territory and all out embracing the full insanity of its creator. The project's fourth output, Cosmic Manifestations, is a strange, though satisfying example of how Sabo's songwriting feels both unique and common. On the one hand, the music here is raw and abrasive, with a twangy tone that sounds as if this guy turned the treble on his guitar and bass up to 11 for some extra, mechanical grit (opening track especially). The tempo is mostly upbeat throughout the first half of the album, and occasionally flirts around with more moderate and melodic elements, either as interludes between moments as aggression or as buildups to them. These more moderate moments especially seem to have a pretty good "hook" to them, which, with a bit of refining, could certainly serve to make Pulsar Colony's music extremely catchy.

Pulsar Colony has typically been labeled as "psychedelic black metal," but in regards to Cosmic Manifestations, it's really only the last two tracks here that appear to be really tapping into influences of psychedelia. The opening to that fourth one with the really long title, with its extended sequence of whooshing electronics, slow guitar melody, and clean vocals form Sabo, serves as the perfect build up in mood to the fury that comes later in it, and it's here that these two personalities of the project seem to complement each other most seamlessly. It's both exciting and disappointing in a way, because although the album ends on a high note, it somewhat leaves you wishing that all of it had delved more into this style, and had it, it quite likely would've been engaging from a much wider diversity of perspectives.

Cosmic Manifestations pleases, but depending on what you're expecting out of a one man band, or experimental black metal in general, it could also leave a lot to be desired. Nonetheless, it's really the second half of it that makes the magic here, and demonstrates that Chris Sabo is playing around with some ideas that have the potential to make this project go from "good" to "excellent" in the near future. Room for improvement? Most definitely. But personally, I'd choose an album that gets better as it goes along over one that degenerates any day.

Go manifest yourself... cosmically.