Milo Lane
A surefire way to pique my interest is to record one song and call it an album. However, not many things can be Dopesmoker or Crimson. A slightly more realistic move in today’s age of thirty-second attention spans is to put four humongous songs next to each other and call them an album. And in A Flock Named Murder – Incendiary Sanctum‘s case, I found it quite hard to lose focus.
There is a lightness to it that’s hard to describe. The record is in no way short on rawness, energy, or pure Black Metal, but it remains elegant all the way through. The beginning feels like an invocation. The ending is a mournful farewell. Everything in between is, at the same time, fast and dynamic—and tender, like a young animal.
You forget about time. A seventeen-minute song is over in a heartbeat, and you bring it back to the beginning just to listen to it again. There’s an emotional weight to it, a melancholy that the Northerners understand better than I do. The uptempo moments have an old Windir quality to them—pure and melodic, as wide and alive as a whole forest. There is just enough grit to please my inner elitist trve kvlt shadow-self, but it never tries too hard. No corpses of dead genres have been reanimated during the making of this album. It’s original enough to stand out and familiar enough to entice fans of an older, iconic sound. It isn’t overproduced—there’s mud to it, color and distortion, rough edges like a picture frame—and the painting inside is close to being a true masterpiece.
One thing we need to talk about… is the album cover. To counter the love I’ve given this record so far, I have to say I hate it. Not the artwork itself—I’d love it on a space war MeloDeath madness type album—but I just don’t hear it here. There isn’t a single melody that feels connected to that image. It’s way too Plan 9 from Outer Space meets Jotun by In Flames.
I can’t describe how much more boring I expected these four endless songs to be. (Sorry to any other seventeen-minute song I’ve called boring before—for calling you boring!) In my defense, I like boring. There is a box in the endless closet of my music taste with a heart-shaped “bleak and boring” sticker on it. However, not a second of the hour that is this album would I call redundant. And that says a lot. The whole work locks you in—at first gently, then grabs you, claw-clad, by the throat. And when it releases you, you ask, “Can we please go again?” It says yes—and eats you again.
Label: Hypaethral Records
Release date: May 2, 2025
Website: https://www.facebook.com/AmongTheFlock/
Country: Canada
Score: No score, but it sounds like a great one to me!
Metal Eclipse Reviews 