Holy Fawn - Death Spells

I was turned onto this album a few weeks ago by the recommendation of the one and only Randy Blythe, not like we spoke personally at all and he told me alone about this album. No, he posted a picture on Instagram with a caption speaking to the album’s vast beauty,and I decided to check it out.

Death Spells is Holy Fawn’s second album following a shorter 2015 release, Realms, and a one-off single, “Reykur”, in 2016. This album’s cover and the band’s short Bandcamp bio, give very apparent insight into their appreciation of and reverence for the natural world. And the shoegaze-y ambiance and ambient black metal across Death Spells certainly encapsulate the spirit of nature much in the way more overtly black metal-focused groups like Wolves in the Throne Room do as they consciously channel their surrounding natural environment through their music.

Weaving soothing and ethereally angelic clean vocals (often in an unusually indie styling for this form of music) into a consistently dynamic blend of ambient post-metal in the vein of Russian Circles and the meditative spirit of the shoegaze of If These Trees Could Talk, Holy Fawn construct an album that is somehow incredibly serene and truly beautiful, but also one that constantly succeeds in maintaining fixation through well-timed inflections of black metal and screamo (on one occasion) vocals and bursts of post-metal guitar distortion and noise. The band do not simply settle for the basic contentment of providing a shoegaze-y background noise album to lull a yoga class to sleep, though. There are no doubt a vast wealth of absolutely gorgeous ambient passages that make me feel so deeply at peace with the natural world around me, like the smooth singing and shimmering ambiance that “Drag Me into the Woods” leads with, and the beautifully cleanly sung passages amid the shoegaze guitar backdrops on the intro of “Arrows” and all across “Seer”. The song “Take Me With You” and the interlude track, “Same Blood”, also make use of stunningly beautiful guitar ambiance that a band like Hammock, who specializes in just that, would be jealous of.

One criticism I have for this album is that sometimes in its louder, more noisy moments, the noise in tandem with the distorted guitar is sometimes not additive to the experience of the song or the album, from a production standpoint and ends up being a momentary distraction from the overall grand beauty the album offers. There are many well-executed incorporations of noise of various distortion levels into the songs on the album, but something about the heavy guitars in the mix at the same time often leads to them not clicking as well as they should.

Another is that the album can be a little formulaic in its structures across a number of tracks, building slowly from ambient post-rock into a heavier post-metal form shoegaze on most of its songs. I also found the more screamo-style vocals on the song “Yawning” to be a bit of a turn-off, but I know that’s just my personal aversion to that vocal style (still, I’m glad it only showed up on one track).

But despite that, I think this album brings much more good to the table than bad, and I really enjoy the brighter atmosphere it takes on amid all the harrowing death metal and nihilistic black metal releases I’ve heard competing with each other for who can be the most sonically abusive. It’s just nice to have a band be nice to me and give me some pretty music after subjecting myself to musical BDSM day-in-day-out for weeks (which I’m not complaining about). Death Spells reaches for a soulful connection to the heart of Earth’s nature and it grasps it fully. And the fact that Holy Fawn can make even a formulaic metallic shoegaze album captivating and immersive for a whole hour is certainly a feat that puts them in the same league as bands like Hammock and Explosions in the Sky. I feel, though, like they are going to have to find ways in the future to break the mold they played into so heavily on this album if they want to improve their craft. Death Spells is most certainly a fine release in its field, but it’s one that also shows where the band need to focus their efforts next, which I look forward to hearing and sitting down to have some tea in the mountains with.