Saor - Forgotten Paths

Just as the new year delivered a new pair of Panopticon songs, so it gave us a new album from Andy Marshall’s Saor, a similarly naturalistic and folky solo project blending Scottish, rather than Appalachian, folk music with the transcendence of ambient black metal. In the visceral energy of this typically dark music form, Marshall finds strength and fortitude in the connection he makes with it to the natural world.

Despite Marshall’s tendency toward sprawling compositions, their presentation of only three of them with one short outro cut to round them off clocks Forgotten Paths in at just over thrity-eight minutes. And in those thirty-eight minutes, Marshall really doesn’t do much more than channel the basic essence of his project.

The opening title song jumps into the rushing swells of blast beats and black metal tremolo picking turned inside out to channel the silent emphatic resilience of the natural world itself portrayed so romantically in the song’s lyrics, soon expounded upon by the folky string and woodwind instrumentation that eventually quiets down into some pensive, might I say melodramatic, piano plinking that tries again to build some more blackgazey atmosphere, but it continues to walk in circles until its close without really doing anything vital or rewarding. It’s all very sonically pretty, but it’s kind of just the status quo for Saor and this kind of atmospheric black metal.

The second song, “Monadh”, which poetically details the changing of the light’s forms and shadows during the setting of the sun behind mountains, takes its time with an ambient intro of pianos and acoustic guitars that builds into a much more emotive folky blackgaze section than any part of the opening cut. Unfortunately, the song kind of just coasts from there on out for too long until a rather unimaginative cinematic mellow to produce the crescendo Marshall wanted the song to have, but it’s not really a new high point for the song, it just slows down and jumps back up to where it was. I’d say at least for a little while it’s more interesting than the first song, but not for long enough.

The album’s third and longest piece, “Bròn”, makes use of some slightly more exclusively metallic instrumentation, more interesting guitar work, and more intermittent use of the usual folk strings and flutes. Aside from the short female vocal feature before the predictable acoustic break and after its meager double-bass crescendo, it’s pretty much more of the same meandering through the same structures that the previous two songs underused.

The album closes with the brief (five-minute) acoustic instrumental coda of “Exile”, which really just provides an atmospheric cool-down. It’s not really a necessary addition to the album, and it just feels like at this point Marshall needed to pad the album with a few minutes to make it just long enough to turn it in, and anyone who’s ever written that paper knows they’re not turning in the best paper possible.

Forgotten Paths surely captures the uplifting, naturalist atmosphere that has been Andy Marshall’s main goal with Saor from the start, but despite it’s brevity and consistently beautious aesthetic, it finds itself leaning so heavily on solely the worshipful vibe it cultivates through the swelling of blackgaze guitar progressions and moderate blast beat drumming that constitutes simply the baseline of his work. And it really never ascends much more beyond that, which is incredibly disappointing. It’s not that this album needed some memorable melodies (though it could have used some of those), it’s that it could have used anything to give it some sense of inspiration besides being out in nature and thinking it’s pretty. I’m not saying that’s all that Andy Marshall was inspired by here, but it really doesn’t sound like he went into this with any other ideas besides capturing the same vibe he’s been capturing with other, more notable albums under project for years now. And it didn’t seem like he was really able to drum up anything interesting musically or lyrically along the way. It seems like he just went with his usual wide-scope formats and hoped everything would work itself out to fill in the little details on its own. I don’t like to say it, but it feels like an overwhelmingly low-effort recycling of an album from Saor. Hopefully this is just a momentary stumble for Andy Marshall, and hopefully Saor is not as creatively expired as this album suggests.

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