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I really enjoyed Raventale's sophomore album Long Passed Days last year, and so I was pleased to see this in my mailbox from the tireless BadMoodMan Music. Long Passed Days was a sweeping, moody disc of doomy Black Metal with a lot of scope and grandeur. This new one, Mortal Aspirations, takes that formula and drives it in a darker, more aggressive direction.

Raventale's last album was big and orchestral, but sort of mellow. Mortal Aspirations is heavier, meaner, and darker all around. The opener "The Fall of the Mortal Aspirations" starts out trancy and atmospheric, but then cranks up and pummels your face with hard-hitting riffs and pounding drums. As before, all these songs are big and epic, but this time they always come back to the heavy pounding, making the spacey keyboard passages even more distinct. For all that it is still slow and moody, there is a lot more snap to the songwriting this time, and the album has more presence. I do think some of the songs take too long to develop, and could have been tightened up, but this is a pretty minor beef. I dig this band because the guy obviously has a point of view and a place he is going with his music. So many bands have nothing at all to really say, but that isn't true of Astaroth and his one-man project Raventale. This is a band it will be a pleasure to follow over the years.