Band:	Eucharist
Album:	I Am The Void
Style:	Melodic black metal, Melodic death metal
Release date:	March 2022

01. Shadows
02. A Vast Land Of Eternal Night
03. Goddess Of Filth (Tlazolteotl)
04. In The Blaze Of The Blood Red Moon
05. Mistress Of Nightmares
06. Nexion
07. Where The Sinister Dwell
08. In The Heart Of Infinity
09. Lilith
10. Darkness Divine
11. I Am The Void

A comeback album from a cult Swedish melodic black/death metal band? Where have I heard that before?

There's certainly a lot of parallels to be drawn between Eucharist and Unanimated. Both in the same vein as but outshined by Dissection. Both Swedish. Both released debuts in 1993, and then went on to release their masterpieces as a follow-up. Said masterpiece would go on to be a cult classic, though never really achieving widespread recognition. A long hiatus that lasts at least a decade. Unanimated also managed to sneak two comeback albums since, and I'm calling them both comebacks because they were also more than a decade apart. But what was most interesting was that both these bands, who occupy basically the same space in my mind, almost released comeback albums in the exact same month. Alas, Eucharist's I Am The Void was delayed, otherwise I would've release reviews on the same day too.

Still, it is a bit weird to call this an Eucharist album. Though most of the band did reunite back in 2015, it seems that since then only two of the members decided to participate in the actual recording, and one of them, namely drummer Daniel Erlandsson, only in the songwriting department, as drums are actually recorded by Simon Schilling. So, it essentially seems a few steps removed from being a Markus Johnsson solo record, as he's the only other performer and songwriter, and clearly the creative vision behind I Am The Void, and the one who set out to create a darker version of Eucharist. Well, one thing is for sure, if A Velvet Creation and Mirrorworlds toed the line between black metal and death metal, I Am The Void gleefully steps into black metal.

I admit that I'm not the biggest fan of either Unanimated nor Eucharist, as much as I appreciate their place in history, and I handled I Am The Void mostly because of that. So being met by old school Swedish black metal instead was a change of pace. However one that gets dauntingly more challenging when met with the 76 minutes runtime of the album. A lot of albums can rely on atmosphere building or a sense of immensity or just purely great songwriting to carry runtimes this big. I Am The Void has none of these. I Am The Void is a series of neatly tied segments, but segments which lose their steam quite quickly, and in a couple of songs run out of any kind of surprises. This isn't to say that the album isn't without its moments, because there's clearly skill involved here, but that these moments are scattered through overly stretched compositions that just fall flat.

I'd like to think that this album would've been a lot better with someone to do some tough editing on it. Other than the drumming, whose drum fills do shake things up once in a while, it's quite clear that this is an album done by a single person. That is indeed quite a black metal tradition, and can often lead to great results. But it also sometimes feel like biting more that one can chew. Johnsson's screeches are not entirely unfit for black metal and would've worked better a more focused context, but let's just say that their absence from "Nexion" made it instantly my favorite track from the record. It's not entirely down to the songwriting and performance, but there's something about the mixing that makes the drums sound weird (which makes it even more frustrating when the echo from some of the drum fills sounds so so good), as well the dry guitar cutting the branch from under the feet of any possible sense of atmosphere that could develop.

I don't really like being so negative about a band whose legacy I respect, and it's weird whenever a really great moment happens as I'm listening to it and I'm almost tempted to change my mind. But those moments never last.