Golden Ashes - Gold are the Ashes of the Restorer

I really like this band name okay?

My first thought upon hearing Golden Ashes was "I feel like this is trying to be Summoning but actually black metal."  My second thought was "No actually this just sounds like fuzz trying to gain sentience."  My third thought was "This has to be a one man project, no way several people signed off on this lazy piece of shit."  My fourth thought was "Huh actually I can't stop listening to this even though it's objectively super fucking basic."  My fifth thought was "Oh shit wait this is the guy behind Gnaw Their Tongues."

Now, I'm not familiar with Gnaw Their Tongues really, at least not beyond the incredibly basic knowledge of knowing that the name is super cool and that the dude behind the project (Mories, going by his real name here, Maurice De Jong) tends to focus on experimental noise in a black metal context.  Golden Ashes here is a bit more straightforwardly black metal, but it retains both the "experimental" and the "noise" by simply being mega lo-fi and distantly atmospheric.  There are synths that carry the melody throughout each song, but they really just play one chord for a whole note each measure and change up two or three times each section while the drums tick away meaninglessly and the guitars occupy some completely inconsequential space in the background as featureless distortion. 

That's really all there is to say when it comes to the music itself.  It's very basic, almost offensively so, just ultra-green lo-fi atmoblack with no real outside-the-box thinking behind that.  But despite that, I'm actually kind of enraptured by it.  Every song sounds more or less completely the same, they're all just blasting at the same tempo with quiet BM vocals and random buzzing guitar lines with prominent synths in the foreground that don't play anything beyond one or two notes at a time, but it's just constructed and presented in a way that I can't help but find endearing.  "Drifting Slowly Through the Portal of Sorrow Towards the Void of Death" stands as the only song (to my memory at least, I could be wrong because though I do like this album, it kinda lacks staying power) that stays purely ambient the whole time, and as such it's pretty clearly the best one simply because the soundscape isn't cluttered with shoehorned-in metalisms.  What this sounds like to me is if somebody had Summoning described to them poorly and then tried to emulate it, like an ESL speaker who can write with perfect English grammar but misspells every third word.  Like, it's got the basic aesthetic idea of Summoning down perfectly but something got lost in translation and ol' Maurice here thought they were still a metal band and tried to just kinda cram black metal tropes in along with the epic atmosphere. 

Regardless, it's well done despite how brain dead simple it is.  I think that speaks to how good of a songwriter De Jong is, because he took basically three basic building blocks and crafted eight entrancing songs out of them.  I said this lacks in staying power somewhat and that's certainly true, but I mean that mostly in the sense that I don't catch myself humming these melodies outside of actually listening to it, but I can't deny the magnetism that's drawn me back to Gold are the Ashes of the Restorer more than a few times over the last few weeks.  There's something here that I can't quite articulate, but it's something that I definitely really enjoy.


RATING: 79%