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| Artwork by Dusty Peterson. |
Hoth returns with Astral Necromancy, following up to 2014’s Oathbreaker. Their debut Infinite Darkness mixed Skeletonwitch and Amon Amarth with Star Wars fandom, but didn’t predict the nuanced folky black metal of Oathbreaker. Chronicling the rise and fall of a hero forsaking the light and succumbing to darkness, with the music becoming progressively darker as the character embraced darkness. Without referencing Star Wars it was easily read as a Darth Vader concept album.
Astral Necromancy returns to esoteric Star Wars concepts, but tells a larger, darker story with composition to match. In contrast to Oathbreaker, Astral Necromancy isn’t a chronological concept album but a collection of songs, all part of the same universe-spanning story. Musically it is more immediate with fewer folk and ambient passages, the majority of the album is either riffs or solos. The tone is set with “Vengeance”, a ripping track that opens the album at full burn. It introduces both the sound of the album, as well as the concept. Tearing through riffs and solos it talks of vengeance, both against old masters as well as time and memory; the desire and give in to darkness, and burn out the light, despite being born in it.
Like Oathbreaker, there is no mention of anything explicitly Star Wars on Astral Necromancy, but throughout the album themes of the dark side of the force recur; trading one’s soul for dark knowledge and in the process giving up one’s humanity to embrace darkness, isolation and anger. The duality of lusting for power and awareness of what is lost along the way permeates the album. Tracks like “The Horrid Truth”, “Ascension”, and “The Void Between The Stars” speak knowingly of what one loses along the path to the darkness, and contrast with tracks like “Passage into Entropy” and “The Gathering of the Accursed Artifacts” speaking of the power the darkness brings. “The Citadel of the Necromancer” and “Solitude” bring everything together. The latter describes the battle against and defeat of the Necromancer’s apprentice whose commitment to the darkness paled in comparison to the light of his former master. The former describes the Necromancer’s gnawing fear, as he waits in his fortress for a vision that never comes, that all the sacrifice will amount to nothing.
Astral Necromancy is approachable despite it's blackened space-ward gaze. The production is pristine with extremely precise drums, tight guitar playing and raspy vocal delivery that manages to be comprehensible. Though it feels leaner, it’s almost the same length as Oathbreaker, making it seem like Hoth have jammed two albums’ worth of riffs into one album and trimmed almost all the fat. It makes for an excellent musical complement to their previous effort, objectively better, but ultimately a complement, rather than simply superior.