I don't cover music from my country that often, since I feel like I can't properly put apart my biases, whether positive or negative, and I prefer to have someone more detached take over. One of the most notable exception was me covering this band's previous album. Inert & Unerring felt like a special step for the band, who up to that point felt like a good but less specific kind of post-black metal / DSBM sound, perhaps more attention grabbing due to the Descend Into Despair lineup connections, but that album added a very specific context to it by attaching it to the Romanian identity, both in a post-Soviet era way and a rural exile way, and to a narrative about generational conflicts that still left much open to personal interpretation, and that felt like one I was able to relate to in a more specific way.
Four years later we have a follow up that loses some of that specificity by focusing on a theme that is more universal, but nonetheless very effective in being a catalyst for emotional music. Love and loss. Grief and hope. "The product of the most radiant hope and the deepest absence" as the band puts it in the Bandcamp description. Track titles like "Stay A Little Longer" and "To Not Grow Old" paint a very vivid picture of what the album is about. The band being vague about the real event that likely was at the root of this album's creation means that each listener can relate to grief in their own way, or in my personal case the anticipation of grief, without it having to be in the mold of either the death of a lover or the death of a parent or the death of a friend. There is room for all kinds of grief on Infinite Presence.
It is completely possible, just like it was the case with Inert & Unerring, to listen to Infinite Presence without feeling the need to interact with its themes, even if the track titles and lyrics being in English make that easier for a larger audience. Infinite Presence has an even stronger blackgaze presence than its predecessors, partly because of the addition of Lunember's Victor N. as a vocalist, whose vocals do heavily evoke Deafheaven's George Clarke in the shriekier moments. There's much in common musically as well between the two bands, mostly in the more metal moments in a way that feels like an addendum rather than a copy, but Genune expand that influence with more clean vocal moments that have a more doom metal feeling to them, a slow deconstruction at the end of "Stay A Little Longer", an acoustic interlude in the title track, and some synth heavy moments.
Life moves fast. Take a moment to appreciate the music. Take a moment to appreciate the people.
