Alrakis - Echoes from Eta Carinae

Say what you will about Deafheaven, but they’re still leagues ahead of so many of the bands making the kind of ethereal, non-suicidal brand of ambient black metal they helped put on the map. I’m not talking about the more DSBM-focused projects like Leviathan or Xasthur or Deadspace, I’m talking about the bands like Ghost Bath and Harakiri for the Sky making very unimaginative blackgaze a lot of the time. It’s hard to find bands working bright ambiance into black metal with the same emotional potency Deafheaven do, which is why I appreciate this album from Alrakis.

It’s not that the bar has just been lowered by so many bands simply watering down some generic black metal with some generic echo-y guitars; there’s still bands like Deafheaven and Altar of Plagues to point to for high standards. But there’s still so much that I’ve heard that’s just disappointing and devoid of the immense feelings its trying so hard to convey, that this album is such a nice thing to hear, and it seems to specifically make a strong case for the genre as well.

What I like that Alrakis has done with this single 52-minute song of an album is somehow embody blackgaze and ambient black metal so at its core, it should be another boring, generic dud of an album, but with such a great representation of what the style sounds like when it succeeds.

Echoes from Eta Carinae goes pretty heavy on the shoegaze elements for most of the middle of the long, sprawling singular piece, and especially on the ambiance in the opening minutes of the song. It’s not quite as blast-beat-filled and aggressive as something like “Brought to the Water” from Deafheaven. It’s a blackgaze album that puts a huge emphasis on the “gaze” part of it. The screams are more echo-y and deeply buried under the layered ambient strings and swelling reverberated guitars. It’s not like the black metal takes a back seat to the shoegaze on this piece, but both are used to craft the smooth journey of dynamic sound this album seeks to achieve with the two as its main components. Plainly, a bunch of bombastic explosions of blast beats and dominating guitars would not fit the purpose of this song.

Unlike so many prog metal opuses that stretch a single track out beyond the 20-minute mark, doing so by way of multiple individually palpable sections, Echoes from Eta Carinae really is just one, continuous song that really takes its time to unfold and continuously reshape. And it’s a song that really focuses on that constant reshaping as the driving force to its overarching dynamic. While few snapshots of the album in the form of 30-second clips or even minute-long clips might suggest extreme, droning stagnation, it couldn’t be less true. The entire piece builds and swirls around though spacey regions of sound of gradually changing density with such meticulous patience and an amazing sense of directionality that I have a hard time comprehending the methods behind.

It’s not just the more continuous compositional format that gives this album a strong backbone, but the gorgeous instrumentation and chord progressions it patiently transitions through allow it to exemplify the exact meditative catharsis blackgaze is so great at achieving when done well. Indeed, this is a meditative piece entirely, not one for extensive aggressive headbanging or energetic blasting at the gym or anything. This is a piece meant to be focused on in its own space, conducting a meditative journey through one’s own psychological cosmos, as well as providing some truly emotional highs and lows to drive that meditation beyond the superficial.