EVILFEAST — Lost Horizons of Wisdom (review)

EVILFEAST — Lost Horizons of Wisdom album cover Album · 2008 · Atmospheric Black Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4.5/5 ·
Wilytank
It's always a good sign for me when a black metal album begins with a beautiful, spacey ambient piece before it actually dives into the riffs. Evilfeast's Lost Horizons of Wisdom falls into this niche of spacey atmospheric black metal that I enjoy and is easily one of the best albums in that niche that I've found in a long time. The band has released other albums, but even they don't strike me as strongly as Lost Horizons of Wisdom, mainly because I prefer this album's structure: 5 ten+ minute long tracks rather than 8 or 9 shorter ones including interludes.

The riffs themselves sound like a mix of Darkspace and Lunar Aurora during the faster parts, but it's not them alone that make the album. There's ambient bits thrown in throughout the album, not constantly, but just in the right places. The guitars may sound a little dry, but the ambiance in the right places gives them a booster shot to help them forward through each of these long songs.

When the ambiance plays by itself though it sounds the most mystical. The beginning of "Algol's Northern Lights and the break in "Grimspirit the Forest Wanderer" are the best examples of this especially the former as it's the intro to the album. The only time the ambiance gets carried away is in "My Tower Among the Timeless Mountains" because it goes on for way too long. It's a twenty minute long song, but it could have been cut a good five and a half minutes shorter because that's how long this intro is.

The best parts of the album though are when the metal instruments and the ambiance play together. And while there's plenty of that going on here, some of them are extremely memorable; in particular, the starry sounding part starting at the 6:10 mark of "Grimspirit...", the slower Elffor-esque parts after the intro on "Cold Chains of Despondency", and the outro of the same song which reuses the ambiance used in the intro. Hell even the intro to "Algol's Northern Lights" sounds great when it turns up again near the end of the title track when it's played with the rest of the instruments.

Lost Horizons of Wisdom is a great album for fans of spacey sounding black metal. It's great for fans of Kataxu, Lunar Aurora, Vinterriket and the like. Despite it being longer than Evilfeast's other three full-lengths and therefore may be a tougher nut to crack, when you do crack it it's well worth it.

(91/100)
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