Here’s the thing: You’ve probably heard this before. Australia’s Encircling Sea grafts earthy black metal themes and musical motifs onto a bedrock of lengthy clean doom structures and sweeping post-rock. So, while the band’s sound is altogether more lilting and pastoral than Wolves in the Throne Room, Agalloch, or Altar of Plagues, and not nearly so precious as the Frenchy contingent of Alcest et al., these songs are new buildings with old walls. Ultimately, though, the quality of execution is so high that you just might like to make yourself a home here.
So yes, while the dominant mode of Encircling Sea is atmospheric black metal/post-rock, there are touches of Panopticon-era Isis and fellow Aussies Adrift for Days, which makes A Forgotten Land an entirely sumptuous album, rich with loamy groundedness and horizonless open spaces. “Yearn” opens the album with a floating dark ambience that billows gradually to a windswept sort of tremolo drone, and as these first minutes spill out into the rustling shuffle of drums and overdubbed guitar lines, they illustrate the timelessly affecting qualities of steadfast execution and emotive songwriting. Shortly after the song’s ten-minute mark, the band eases back into a gorgeously open quiet section, where the clean guitars chime endlessly and the snare – this perfect, simple, softly tight snare sound – pings out a languidly martial cadence. It lasts only two minutes, but provides a crucial recentering, and a fine springboard for the vaguely post-punkish section that follows before winding back into drifting ambience.
Somewhat paradoxically, despite the fact that A Forgotten Land’s four songs range from the long to the really long, the thing that prevents them from seeming overlong and tedious is that they don’t try to do too much. When they introduce new elements, or carry a previously-introduced theme in a slightly sideways direction, the transitions are so smoothly rounded as to become invisible. “Transcend” revisits lyrical and vocal themes in its two primary heavy sections, and its sedated midsection features some bewitching female vocals (a little reminiscent of Jesse Sykes). The song’s closing section almost tilts into atmospheric sludge territory, and one might think of Seidr for a (very) rough comparison of a band riding the slippery midground between slow, atmospheric black metal and epic, churning sludge/doom.
“Become” is a perfectly lovely acoustic folk number, all twangy strumming in ¾ time, melancholy violin accompaniment, and breathy female backing vocals, and while album closer “Return” ends up dragging considerably in its third act, the whole damn package is so unerringly pleasant that I don’t really mind if it turns itself into a plateau of sounds that I like instead of a hiking trail of consistently attention-grabbing unexpected steps and turns. Encircling Sea hasn’t broken much new ground with A Forgotten Land, but these songs drip with such warmth and commitment that this particular listener can’t help but be enchanted. The road often burgeons with long, low hours, but sometimes there is a light, “calling my name; / calling me home.”
