The Shadowed Road is the sophomore release of international Atmospheric Black Metal band, Sojourner that picks up where their debut, Empires of Ash, left off. The crew is comprised of Chloe Bray on guitars, tin whistle and (clean) vocals, Mike Lamb providing additional guitars, keys and piano, Emilio Crespo offers his harsh rasp on vocals, Mike Wilson covering the low-end register and Riccardo Floridia behind the kits. Despite being a relatively young band (barely three years as a group), they group sounds cohesive and unified with each instrument serving a specific purpose that contributes to the whole picture of the band’s sound—a musical altruism, if you will.

Not too dissimilar to the debut, there is one staunch difference between the 2016 full-length and this year’s new offering: size. Empires of Ash sounded complete, but The Shadowed Road sounds massive. I don’t mean “loud”, I mean epic, huge, grandiose. Though staunchly different than Bathory’s Blood Fire Death to Twilights… trilogy, this record has the same sense of epic-ness. Even the smaller melodies like the intro to “Ode to the Sovereign” are completely captivating. I think this is largely in part to how effortlessly the band is able to ebb and flow from the small, subtle melodies until it builds and builds before reaching the musical and emotional climax.

With that said, it should be noted that this record manages to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of modern Atmospheric Black Metal. Sure, you could argue Sojourner creates long-form songs that could possibly blend together if you aren’t paying attention, but if you invest any attention to the music you can very easily notice the nuances in each song such as the Summoning-esque middle section of “Ode to the Sovereign”, the Katatonia feeling track “An Oath Sworn in Sorrow” or the surprisingly technical riffs in “Titan” or “Where Lost Hope Lies”—point being that this record doesn’t suffer from being the clichés or the fixed song structures of a lot of “Bandcamp Bedroom Black Metal”.

As much as I enjoy this record, I do think it has some issues. The harsh vocals from Emilio Crespo are not very memorable; they almost seem to fill space because Black Metal is “supposed to” have harsh vocals such as these, but again, they do not engage me. In fact, there have been multiple times where I have been listening to the melodies of the keyboards or the riffs of the guitars and then suddenly realized that there have been vocals going on simultaneously for some time that I completely ignored or blocked out (I’m not sure which). On the flip side, whenever Chloe Bray’s soft vocals make an entrance, I immediately note them and, for the most part, enjoy them. I say mostly as sometimes her voice comes across as forced, yet stale and devoid of emotion and while the melodies she is offering may be interesting, the manner in which they are presented aren’t. In all honesty, if this record was released instrumentally (hint hint) I would be all over it. Instrumental releases of records that have vocals typically don’t entice me, but I would be lying if I said I did not think that both vocal duties were the weakest links of the proverbial chain. Regardless, the vocals are passable for the most part.

As a record, The Shadowed Road is a perfectly fine record; however, if you have heard one track from the record, you may as well have heard the whole thing. There does seem to be a formula that the record follows where you can almost begin to guess when the Doom-laden chugs are about to begin or when Bray is going to interject clean vocals or when a piano interlude is going to give way to a semi-Dungeon Synth-y passage before returning to “the riff”. Thankfully, despite the rigidity of the tracks, the songs are all quite solid, so while I am never surprised by a sudden departure from the formula, I am no less entertained.

Listen / Purchase: Here

-CBE