Release Date: 11 October 1999
Song Count: 8
Duration: 40 minutes, 29 seconds
Rating: 6.6/10
Description:
Song Count: 8
Duration: 40 minutes, 29 seconds
Rating: 6.6/10
Description:
(Note: Oh hey, 250th album review!)
Ready for the launching of an inhumane rocketship away from earth, we witness the spectacle of a reborn demigod being released from his shackles at the bottom of a crater of the moon to retrieve an all-powerful artifact. If you have no clue what the sentence you just read was, this is only the surface of the highly complex lyrical canon and storytelling behind The Power Cosmic, a symphonic black metal album from the tail end of the millennium past. The masterminds behind this fascinating piece are Sheffield-based band Bal-Sagoth, a group of then-five musicians, all united under the shared goal of bringing science-fiction and fantasy storytelling together with the medium of the metal genre. Though the band has yet to release any new music in a decade's time now, it is an intriguing dive to take a look at a snippet of their music and lore.
Though the essence dominating the soundscape is a marriage between symphonic guitar riffs being fired along and black metal tinted brutality, the tracks contain a lot more of a dark tint and gritty texture to them compared to most other bands and works of the calibre, making it sound wildly unique as a result. Vocalist Bryon Roberts alternates between a grand feeling, clean style of delivery akin to what one would imagine an all-powerful deity to sound like, and highly unclean and choked out vocals more reminiscent of, to put it most accurately, a pained pterodactyl than human speech. A sort of fog or air of mysticism is cast through the raw and abrasive way the music sounds whilst simultaneously telling a story and alluring to being something larger than its surface-level tune.
With gods and demigods, space and time travel, supernatural powers and destructive wars and horrors on a cosmically large scope, the more narrative side of The Power Cosmic has plenty to offer for those willing to dive into the details of what is being sung about in the eight tracks. The story follows Zurra, an independent malicious demigod who found himself released from his imprisonment under the Mare Imbrium - essentially a lava plain on the real Moon - and is on the hunt for the shards of the Empyreal Lexicon, an artifact described to bring great power to its wielder. Throughout his journeys and battles on this quest, it is repeatedly shown to us through the lyrics that this protagonist is not a character to actually root for or morally align oneself with - as such, he is consistently on the verge of being stopped by other entities vowing to prevent the repeat of further great disasters already caused by him, and receives his consequences accordingly in the end. It is important to note, however, that the majority of this story is not told through the actual songs' lyrics, but rather through a lyrical booklet that gives the actual contexts in excruciating detail, while the former only acts out the most key lines in a way where it is often even unclear who is being portrayed with each lyric.
Conceptually, this album has aspects of brilliance embedded within it and is clearly a piece of a larger pantheon established by the full discography of Bal-Sagoth. And though it achieves the goal of sounding as melodic yet as menacing as possible through its sound and contents, saying that it does an effective job of standing its own ground as a full-fledged story would be frankly untruthful without the lyrical booklet essentially providing every needed explanation. As such, the record emerges as a decent metal album with plenty of enjoyment to derive, yet an ultimately poorly executed concept album that struggles with implementing its highly interesting ideas and story beats on paper into the medium in play. Perhaps this is done much better in other albums of the band, however, and it is safe to say that these guys are no slouches when it comes to making hard-hitting metal music.