adg211288 Eleea is an act from Russia and this is project's debut album I (2016). This review intro is intentionally sparse as I can't find much background about this artist, but the picture on Facebook suggests it to be a solo project. Onto the music.

On I Eleea combines space ambient music with a lo-fi black metal guitar sound, also drawing on drone a little bit, resulting in something that is cold, raw and atmospheric. The metal elements on the release only appear on every other track starting from the second but the odd numbered tracks are all much shorter compositions than their even numbered counterparts, making this release roughly half and half pure ambient and ambient black metal work, at least to my ears. It's mostly instrumental, with some instances of at least what I presume are vocals in the background. It's actually quite hard to be sure on this album whether it's a human voice or some sound effect, with the way the buzz of the raw production drowns some of the details out.

I'm reminded a little of some of the work of Midnight Odyssey but done in a much more lo-fi manner. The release could be considered lacking somewhat in the traditional kind of heaviness one automatically expects from metal, but I also feel it makes up for it with its spacey atmosphere. Being this lo-fi does mean that, as mentioned above, some details aren't too clear in the mix but I think the album works if this is what Eleea was going for. The metal flavours the ambient rather than the other way around.

I'm not adversed to cold, lo-fi sounds, especially when they're spacey like this one, but I find it to be a little too much here and feel that the music could have used a bit more polish to make the details of the music better defined. The pure ambient parts of the album are done better in this respect as its the guitars that are adding that lo-fi buzz. Overall though it's a pleasant astral journey that Eleea have offered up and worth checking out if the idea of that appeals to you in any way.