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Review: Eldrig - Kali
Eldrig
www.myspace.com/eldrig
Kali

Label: Supernal Music
Year released: 2007
Duration: 37:23
Tracks: 8
Genre: Black Metal

Rating:
4.5/5


Review online: February 7, 2008
Reviewed by: Lars Christiansen
Readers' Rating
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Rated 3.1/5 (62%) (10 Votes)
Review

Eldrig is the solo project of Eldrig Van See, one of the brains behind the amazing Fanisk. Unsurprisingly therefore, this album has a musical style very similar to that of Fanisk, albeit with a lesser emphasis on the bombastic keyboards, instead putting greater stress on the guitars to convey the sense of grandiose melancholy.

Every other track on Kali (beginning with opener "Shakti I") is a short ambient song, which when laid alongside the longer, more epic metal arrangements beginning with "The Great Destroyer" make for a excellent album. You may think that changing of style every other song would stop the album from flowing well, but it doesn't at all, instead adding in a greater depth of foreboding evil to the album's tapestry. The actual guitar based tracks are the main body of the album, running at roughly ten minutes a piece. All tracks are instrumental, but don't let that put you off, as they express a such wide spectrum of color throughout each track you don't actually notice the lack of vocals. Guitars are pretty much all speedily played, thickly layered over each other, creating a wall of sound that is backed by drifting synthesizer work, adding amazing sensations to each track, similar in a way to the powerful, triumphant feeling of Bal Sagoth's works. Even the drum machine is quite natural sounding, though it is still set lower in the mix than the guitars, letting the string work dictate the flow of music with inoffensive simplicity.

Whilst this isn't quite as monolithically mind-blowing as Fanisk's Noontide (which blew me away with its utterly huge soundscapes), it still does a damn good job of invigorating you with every playback without ever getting stale (I've listened to this album on a near daily basis since it was released early in 2007, and I'm still not bored of listening to it). That in itself is something that only the greatest of albums can attest to.

More about Eldrig...
Review: Mysterion (reviewed by Lars Christiansen)
Review: Urlagarne (reviewed by Memnarch)
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