8/10
‘Embraced’ is Surachai’s first album to be recorded as a full band and is written in a four-part harmonic style, with bass, tenor, alto and soprano guitars. Stylistically, ‘Embraced’ is a continuation from 2011’s ‘To No Avail’, which saw Surachai adopting a black metal style mixed with noisy modular synthesizers. There is less noise to be found on this album however, with most of the music following a more conventional modern black metal style. The aforementioned harmony guitars sound fantastic, complete with lots of tremolo picking and dissonant harmonies. The drumming is incredible and the harsh vocals mix in perfectly.
Opening track Ancestral is a fifteen minute epic of intense black metal, ending with a beautiful, eerie ambient section filled with contrasting modular synthesizers which build up unsettling dissonance. The pace picks back up again with the excellent Sentinel and the album closer Surrender continues the relentless assault until it ends with a much more elegant melodic section which is slowly stripped away.
If you are a fan of modern black metal, then you should almost certainly enjoy this album.
Manyara
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