Description
“I never understood how anyone could feel small compared with the universe. After all, man knows how overwhelmingly large it is, and that means he is not small. The fact that man has discovered all this exactly proves his greatness.”
– Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven
HEMELBESTORMER have been a commanding entity in the heavy music scene for over 10 years, with their idiosyncratic take on the merger of post-rock, doomgaze and black metal. Made up of veterans from the Belgian hardcore and metal community, the four piece from Hasselt, Belgium create intricate sonic journeys through space and time built over punishing riffs and spine-chilling climaxes. With their fourth full-length The Radiant Veil HEMELBESTORMER take their songwriting and production to new heights, honouring their name as trailblazers on the intersection of dark and light, the crushingly heavy and the hauntingly beautiful.
Having appeared at many of Europe’s finest music festivals – ranging from Roadburn festival to Dunk! festival to Graspop Metal Meeting – HEMELBESTORMER feel right at home on stages with a wide variety of heavy, experimental and ethereal acts. The road combining ethereal post-rock with seething black metal has been travelled by many acts, but with HEMELBESTORMER that winding path has taken a different turn. Facing away from shoegaze or indie rock influences, the band find a more sophisticated way of incorporating unsettling melodies, blast beats and lo-fi synthesizers to emulate the dark void of space and eerie cold light of stars.
“The record is a journey through our solar system as perceived by the Etruscan civilization,” explains drummer Frederik Cosemans about the album’s enigmatic songtitles. “Each track bears the name of a planet in the old Etruscan language, starting with the Sun (Usil) and ending with Saturn (Satre).”
Powered by HM-2 pedals and a Lovecraft-ian use of retro synths, The Radiant Veil is driven by an old-school mentality that appears both learned and sincere. Produced by main-songwriter Filip Dupont alongside Cosemans, the eerie space noises coalesce like a celestial respiration between the bouts of metallic riffing and tremolo picked riffs. Playing with different textures and references, they place the band’s metallic expeditions in different kinds of atmospheric context; for example, conjuring waves of cosmic crickets on «Cel» while slowing down the journey among showers of pristine Bladerunner-inspired synth lines on «Laran».
Album opener «Usil» is a compositional masterpiece from start to finish, combining seismic riffing with ice-cold guitar leads, as if Russian Circles had been formed in a small Norwegian fisher town in the early 90s. Meticulously building up to a double kick-driven finale, the band carefully lay the groundwork for an hour of transformative music. The following «Turms» continues to demonstrate the band’s penchant for weaving glorious melodies with a soaring overture leading to a driving mid-section featuring Philip Jamieson of Caspian.
“Our guitarist Jo has been friends with Caspian for years, so a collaboration had to come about at some point,” continues Cosemans. “Philip did a fantastic job in the studio and really managed to add his own signature.” Jamieson’s vocals work wonderfully in the music of HEMELBESTORMER, sitting snugly in the composition, which subtly mimics his vocal lines in the subsequent up-tempo bridge. With its blistering guitar lead breaking down into a gritty halftime section, «Turms» is one of the prime examples where The Radiant Veil proves its metal pedigree.
A new journey into the unknown, The Radiant Veil listens like the soundtrack to a video game rather than a movie. The riffing grants a sense of being in control and on the move, which makes for an exceptionally entrancing experience. Amid its violent perspirations and bloodcurdling noises, The Radiant Veil captures a natural sophistication which proves their lengthy tenure as a signature post-metal act. The compositions are winding without overstaying their welcome and the album’s production is fat, warm and honest. The lyrical quotations from William Wordsworth («Cel») and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow («Satre») are traditional yet tasteful, and the artful krautrock and psytrance stylings on «Tiur» and «Satre» respectively will satisfy the more avant-garde oriented listeners.
HEMELBESTORMER are a sight to behold on stage, and with The Radiant Veil they penetrate deeper than ever into the farthest reaches of their sonic space ethos. Once more the Belgians capture the cavernous expanse between the cold lights of the universe, but also our power as humans to explore it, proving their greatness as masterclass storytellers in sight and sound.
FOR FANS OF
Neurosis, ISIS, Year of No Light, The Ruins of Beverast, WuW
