Akhlys - The Dreaming I

By Majbritt Levinsen. "Breath and Levitatation" - just breathe, levitate and let go... Like the title of the first track you are lured into a greater calm with its droning industrial ambiance which starts out this brilliant album.

By Majbritt Levinsen.

Artwork by David Herrerias

"Breath and Levitatation" - just breathe, levitate and let go...

Like the title of the first track you are lured into a greater calm with its droning industrial ambiance which starts out this brilliant album. You will be lifted upwards on a rusty post-apocalyptic roller coaster that, when reaching its peak, will lose all bearings and fall uncontrollable down into a hall of mirrors reflecting kaleidoscopic nightmares, which are both pitch dark, nauseating, claustrophobic and sinister, but also holds a serene beauty, hypnotic aural landscapes and bleak atmospheres that only can be derived from the depths of the unknown.

The Dreaming I became one of the most anticipated releases of the year after I heard "Consummation" on Soundcloud and could only hope for an album which would not stray too far away from the teaser-track. Luckily it did not!

The tracks are all brutally powerful on so many levels, the drumming is insane and goes on in hyper-speed laying a stable foundation to the bleak atmosphere Naas Alcameth paints with big brushes filled with tar, tears, blood, worms, venomous flowers and rotting cadavers. The guitars feels like a fine layers of delicate razorsharp spiderwebs rising and falling in a heavy murky breeze from the depths, and somewhere underneath lies the bass like a low hum from a sleeping beast. The vocal is sinister and dares you to come closer to listen to its terrible tales of nightmares. When Naas Alcameth incantates “Awaken! Awaken!” in the later part of "The Dreaming Eye", it feels like he is at the same time pulling out my guts, and I’m willingly letting him do it because it feels so good.

"Tides of Oneiric Darkness" stands out for me, but just a tiny bit, as all of the tracks on this album are solid compositions all on their own. It is both brutally fast, but has some really breathtaking rises and falls of the grinding guitar and then there are the moments when the track slows down just enough for you to look all the way down into the ethereal depths of the track only to takes off again, I have no words to describe it. The atmosphere can’t get any more dense, dark and absolutely marvelous.

All together it’s just a perfect glimpse into the unknown world of a dreaming mind. We all know how confusing and sometimes scary dreams can be, how our brain catalogues and orders and tidies up in our brain when we sleep, processing our daily inputs. Mostly we have no clue what we dreamt about, sometimes we remember the dreams and then there is the dreams that we cannot remember but still haunts us when we wake up. That nauseating, uneasy feeling we took with us from a dream, that will linger in you for the rest of the day. The Dreaming I is such a feeling transformed into bleak atmospheric black metal.

I am amazed by Naas Alcameth's pitch black atmosphere and brutal execution of the tracks and I’m sure it will find a spot on many best-of list this year.