The Great Old Ones are a French black metal band that has added touches of doom metal and post-rock to their sound in order to better portray the influence of the works of H.P. Lovecraft on their music. That sound you just heard was every eye in the black metal community rolling. Granted, that band description seems a bit overused these days, even though it's confined only to this style of metal, but the surprise is that The Great Old Ones have managed to create an album with enough stylistic and compositional changes to really stand out, as well as an atmosphere capable of conveying the creeping dread and full-on terror that Lovecraft so cherished.
Black metal has a tendency to be one of those musical styles where only the fans can tell the bands apart. As such, it's sometimes difficult to describe the exact changes in style or technique that makes one black metal band so much better than another one playing something similar. The Great Old Ones have taken the template of atmospheric black metal and tweaked it in just such a way as to make their debut album Al Azif supremely entertaining. In the hands of lesser songwriters, these six long tracks would be formless piles of hyperaggressive mush, but TGOO have taken great care to use dynamic shifts in the songs to create changes in mood and keep things interesting. I admit the moods are really just different shades of bleak, but that's to be expected here. We're talking Lovecraft, after all, and while the overall tone is one of crawling horror, there are plenty of spots where the songs open up to grand, even elegant vistas before collapsing back into blastbeats and shrieks. They play with a wide metal vocabulary, using quick drums and tremolo melodies a la Darkthrone, serious power chord structures under a soaring lead like Emperor, and the foggy blastbeat murk used by more modern bands such as Xasthur, Wolves in the Throne Room, or Agalloch.
For all the changeups in tempo and tone, as well as the raw intensity of the songs, there is a surprising amount of melody that comes through from both the guitars and the vocals, and the detailed production really keeps the whole thing on the rails. The vocals are at that nice spot in the mix where they're easily audible, but are tucked just low enough to make the instrumentation sound powerful. The individual elements have good separation so that everything is present without dominating, and it manages to let things like violin come through cleanly, even though the rest of the mix might be filthy and soaked in reverb. It's also really great to hear such a wide variety of guitar tones on a black metal album, and it goes a long way in relieving the monotony that a lot of albums suffer from. There are little sonic surprises around every corner on this release.
I was going to pull out some examples of moments where this album really makes its mark, but after listening again and picking some, I realized that I had chosen something from each track on Al Azif. There's really nothing that pulls me out of this album and makes me think that something could have been done better. The Great Old Ones have leapt out of the gate with a very strong debut filled with small but noticeable flourishes that will reward a great many repeat listens.
You can listen to a few more preview tracks and/or purchase their album at either the band's website or their Bandcamp page.
