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When this band first contacted me, I thought they were the Portugese band, but no, this is a Hoth from the US, who put out an album in 2012 that literally had song titles like "Interstellar Gargantuan Space Slug" and "Torn Asunder By A Wampa", so my hopes for this to be at all serious were not high. Fortunately the band seems to have turned over a more creative leaf, and this album does not appear to be strictly about Star Wars.

This is Death/Black Metal of an intensely melodic school, with a lot of light and shade to the music and quite a bit of acoustic playing to render a nicely haunted mood. The vocals are a competent rasp, and the songwriting is pretty damned spot-on. This band has a good feel for riffs, a solid sense of composition, and they got a good production job that gives their music enough space for the melody to coexist with the heaviness. I was not expecting much out of this, but I really enjoyed it.