Hæthen‘s debut full-length, Shaped by Aeolian Winds, opens with roughly 45 seconds of ambience. Faint cathedral bells ring in the background as a gale gradually builds and surrounds listeners in its storm. It creates a kind of anxious anticipation for what’s to come, which is more or less exactly what you want from an album more than five years in the making. “Where will they take things musically?” you begin to wonder. “Will this have been worth all the time that went into it?” Fortunately, the album ends up delivering on all the answers you’re looking for and then some. It’s an astonishing statement of intent from the Philadelphia trio.
After the initial calm, Aeolian Winds breaks into the kind of storm you’d expect from a black metal band—an absolute whirlwind of blast beats, frostbitten riffage and a sharp, specter-like performance from vocalist Phaedrus, who delivers his lines in an almost-whispered manner that recalls Agalloch’s John Haughm. It’s a template that, at least initially, suggests that the band’s primary stylistic goal was simply the creation of relentless, immersive, cold-weather music—an objective songs like “In the Absence of the Eternal” meet with ease.
But then, the nuances start to present themselves. It starts in the beginning of “Taking the Auspices,” where a series of strummed, acoustic chords lain overtop the cacophony give the song a melodic boost it never knew it needed. Each of the album’s 10+ minute epics—“Amongst the Forlorn Larch” and “Fragments of Spectral Uncertainty”—serve up highlights of unorthodoxy as well: the former with a sudden switch into 3/4 time a third of the way through, and the latter with an extended return to ambient exploration.
By the time you get to a song like “Captured with the Annulus”—and the steady, yet unaggressive beat and distorted (what-sounds-like) mandolin pattern it greets you with—these non-traditional elements don’t really feel all that shocking anymore; the band’s already spent the entire album proving they’re at least as adept with these kinds of outside sounds as they are with the black metal in which they’re rooted. Each successive experiment is integrated so seamlessly and tastefully into their existing sonic palette as to feel completely natural. That’s no small feat, and it’s one of the biggest factors in setting the album apart from the pack.
Ultimately, Shaped by Aeolian Winds is a diverse, intriguing listen that’ll command more and more respect each time through. What Hæthen’s catalog lacked in quantity following 2009’s Wanderer demo, it makes up for with sheer quality here. Five years very well spent.
Keep it heavy,
-Dan
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