Band:	Genune
Album:	Inert & Unerring
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	April 2021

01. Unworthy Sons & Daughters
02. To Drown Within Yourself
03. The Pyres Of Autumn
04. Eastern European Discontent

It's kind of a meme at this point how much I'm making the other reviewers review Romanian music in my stead. Usually to avoid my own biases. But this one? This one I had to do myself.

Inert & Unerring sits on a blurred line. On one hand, it's an album that everyone can relate to. Song titles are in English, lyrics are in English, and those lyrics focus on a pretty broad and universal theme of "identity and the past, exploring the notion of heritage through different lenses", and the band also mentions that it is not a concept album, and it allows for a lot of personal interpretation. So it's kind of a melancholic post-black metal album that deals with personal issues. But on the other hand, there is something that feels distinctively Romanian, or at least Eastern European, on this album, and that I feel is quite though to put into words.

I mean, having that cover art, and having songs titled "Unworthy Sons & Daughters" and "Eastern European Discontent" is a pretty good indicator that the cultural context of the people behind the album has influenced the album itself, and it is something that I am at least somewhat equipped to explain. Or at least to offer my personal interpretation of it. Because I have to admit that upon seeing the cover art and the song titles I expected an album that had the cultural context even more imposed upon the album, but it is actually pretty broad, as previously explained, but the feeling that this couldn't have been made by anybody in some other cultural context still persists.

Starting with the peasant family in the cover art, it's not uniquely Romanian to have rural ancestors, since a couple of centuries ago, the vast majority of people worked in agriculture, but it was enough to go through the Romanian literature imposed in high school to see how much "the land" and "the village" have a presence in our culture, even if nowadays everybody is in the city, going to college and slaving away for a foreign corporation. What would our ancestors think of us and our way of life? What about the wounds of the past that we still feel looking over the communist buildings that dominate our cities' landscapes and the corruption, the distrust, and the "it works like this too" that dominates our mentality? And our political mentality that oscillates between "outsiders are coming to save us" and "outsiders are evil"?

But then again, it is an album themed around identity and heritage, open to interpretation, and nowhere in the lyrics is there anything to completely support my interpretation, so the listener can have a completely different experience, even if they don't feel the "Eastern European discontent", or feel it in a different way. One could listen to this as an atmospheric black metal album, noticing the post/DSBM/neofolk influences and how neatly they are interwoven, the way that the album oozes of sorrow and introspection, that two of the members are past or present Descend Into Despair members (which I guess explains just how well they craft that sorrow), and then calling it a day without necessarily any deeper interpretation. That's a completely valid way to listen to this, since it stands on its own mostly as a great piece of music, even without its exploration of said themes. But that's only half the picture.

So in the end, it's both a uniquely Romanian album, but also one who is open ended enough that it can tend the cultural wounds of almost any listener.