Hope Drone - Cloak of Ash

By Justin Collins. It takes a lot of guts for a band to start their album with a 20-minute-long song called "Unending Grey". It's a steep admission price to ask of a listener, and the jokes about "unending" things write themselves. But yet, Hope Drone does that on their new album, Cloak of Ash, and it might just work.

By Justin Collins.


It takes a lot of guts for a band to start their album with a 20-minute-long song called "Unending Grey". It's a steep admission price to ask of a listener, and the jokes about "unending" things write themselves. But yet, Hope Drone does that on their new album, Cloak of Ash, and it might just work.

I really liked the band's previous self-titled album. It hit an emotional chord with me at the perfect time, mixing post-black metal with vocals that come close to a pure distillation of emotion, with all the inherent beauty and ugliness contained therein. That album was a relatively svelte affair at just 35 minutes, but their Relapse debut is big. Really big. An hour and 18 minutes big. My first few listens made me fear that the band's deft touch for melody was getting lost in the expanse of the album's runtime, but I've come to an interesting place with this album since then.

Take that opening track, for example. It starts out of the gate with pure fury--the band is a master of slow-moving melodies over complex rhythm--but the song drops down into a delicate, gossamer place at about the 5:00 mark, and it stays there, slowly building, for the next seven minutes. That subsection of the song is longer than most whole songs, but there's something eerily compelling in it. Listened to at the right time and in the right environment, it feels like just a moment passing by, yet still filled with wonder.

I said this album "might work" at the outset, and sometimes the album still feels too long to me. Couldn't they have cut some of the riff repetitions? Well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe that would change the entire feel of the album, sacrificing something crucial from its character for brevity. Listening to this album I often found myself in a strange state of uncertainty, unsure of whether I was losing myself in the music or just getting lost. But I do know that, about a week ago, I took a long drive listening to this, and the album just made the miles disappear. It's strange to say for an album that I'm writing a positive review of, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to just anybody. That said, I won't soon forget the trance it put me in while I was belting down the highway, and if that sounds like a place you might like to be, you should give this one a try.

Hope Drone - Hope Drone

Written by Justin C.


I've been listening to Deafheaven's Sunbather lately, "Dream House" in particular. The close of 2014 is kicking me around a bit, so I've felt drawn to music that wears its blackened heart on its sleeve. I haven't wanted to be intellectually engaged as much as I've wanted to be emotionally engaged. Very recently, I stumbled across post-black metal band Hope Drone and their self-titled album, and it scratches a very similar itch that Deafheaven does.

Like Deafheaven's George Clarke, Hope Drone vocalist Chris Rowden sounds as though he wants to obliterate human language and turn it into pure emotion. His vocals sound like they're physically painful to produce. Occasionally, like during the end of "Finite," he sounds nearly unhinged, and it's glorious. But I don't want to belabor the comparison between Deafheaven and Hope Drone too much, because that would be overly reductive and a bit unfair. Hope Drone occupies a similar post-black metal landscape with tons of atmosphere and washes of sound, but they are their own band.

You'll get all the tremolo guitar and blast beats you need here, but there's a great variety in the performances. Album opener "Advent" has guitar that sounds like an electrical storm turned into music. The rest of the song features slower riffs punctuated with tremolo rips. The intro riff for "Grains," although relatively quiet, still has an intense, stabbing quality to it. The drums also add plenty of nuance on their own. Between the requisite blasts, drummer Francil Keil plays everything from straightforward fills to oddly compelling, pulsing flurries.

On the Bandcamp page for this album, one of the buyers, Matt Kaminsky, says this album "gets me right in the feels." That's as succinct a summary as I could come up with. If you're in the mood to get your feels exercised with some gorgeously harsh black metal, you'd be hard pressed to do better than Hope Drone.

[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]