PANOPTICON — Roads to the North (review)

PANOPTICON — Roads to the North album cover Album · 2014 · Atmospheric Black Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4.5/5 ·
adg211288
Austin Lunn's Panopticon project's previous album Kentucky (2012) was something of a unique entry in the atmospheric black metal genre. A combination of lengthy original atmospheric black metal compositions mixed with shorter bursts of American bluegrass, including some covers of traditional songs, it's an album unlike any other I've come across. The follow-up to such an album was perhaps always going to lack the same kind of wow factor as it's predecessor, so it's a good thing that Roads to the North (2014) isn't a complete rehash of Kentucky, but takes some of the same ideas and adds some different ones in to create what is ultimately a very different sounding album.

The most bluegrass thing you will hear on Roads to the North is the instrumental track The Long Road Part 1: One Last Fire, though there are some subtle hints of the influence underneath some of the atmospheric black metal material this time, which is actually a marked difference from Kentucky where the two were presented separately. Lunn deviates from the atmospheric black metal template to also draw on melodic black metal on the album, giving it some more direct sounding passages and more unexpectedly some of these actually shift more towards death metal, resulting in more abrasive elements than an atmospheric black metal album will typically have. On the opposite side of that there are also some influences of post-rock to be found during the softer sections, such as the start of The Long Road Part 3: The Sigh of Summer, a track which transitions through most of the styles mentioned here.

With all these different elements going into it Roads to the North is easily the most diverse of the Panopticon albums I've heard so far. However it's also the one I've had the most difficultly with. Where Kentucky has that really overt wow factor due to being so different to anything else out there and the following album Autumn Eternal (2015) treads less diverse ground (though is still brilliant) making it easier to digest, Roads to the North is much more of a grower. It represents more of a challenge, one that will reward those who have the patience to partake in multiple listens while waiting for the album to really reveal itself to them. But once it does it becomes a very easy album to enjoy for repeated spins. Kentucky will always be special, but those who found it to focus a little too much on non-metal bluegrass work will surely find Roads to the North to be a whole lot more rewarding. Likewise those interested in what a true black metal/bluegrass fusion would sound like will find considerably stronger evidence of such a thing being possible here.
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