Encircling Sea - A Forgotten Land

Written by Ulla Roschat.


A Forgotten Land is the third release of the four piece band “Encircling Sea” from Melbourne/Australia. They had two earlier releases, I (2009) and Écru (2010).

A Forgotten Land is one of these few albums I actually don’t want to describe in categories and terms of genre and style etc. This is one of these few albums of which I just want to say “Listen to it!” “Why” so you’d ask justly, and I’d say “... because this is music with such an amount of emotional impact that all words trying to describe it must fail.”

I’ll give it a go, anyway...

The album consists of four songs and has a total run time of about 68 minutes. The musical style is basically atmospheric black metal that draws on progressive, electronic, post-metal elements and quite a lot of folky tunes. The lyrical themes are about our need to (re-) connect ourselves to the power and beauty of nature and the need to feel being part of it.

All four songs are of considerable length, the shortest “Become” is somewhat short of 11 minutes, the longest “Return” is about 20 minutes long. Each song uses its length to slowly build up its dark and thick atmosphere, to unfold all its many layers of sound textures and fill it up with an incredible wide range of dynamic intensity. Between extremely quiet parts, especially in the all-acoustic sounding “Become”, with the beautiful female/male clean vocal duet and relentlessly crushing heaviness, there’s such an enormous variety of moods and atmospheres, that simply captivate and suck you in, mesmerizing ambient sounds and melodies to fall in love with.

Seriously, this is one of the most emotionally unsettling exciting and beautiful albums I’ve listened to in awhile.

Listen to it!!!

[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]