Sunday, September 12, 2010

Dornenreich - Durch Den Traum


2006; 8 tracks


This, my friends, was the first album I'd ever heard that was even remotely close to the genre "black metal." It was my first encounter with the German band Dornenreich, and my first true experience with music. By that, I mean that it really took me somewhere. The title Durch Den Traum, or "Journey Through a Dream," was just that - a journey. Nothing in Dornenreich's discography sounds like this, for these 8 chilling tracks of darkness are unlike anything I've ever heard before. This album is incredible. The majority of it is soft, whispered, and at times frantic - the instruments seemingly wound to their fullest potential and mournfully wailing achingly heartbroken sounds. There are parts to the album, however, that are absolutely mindnumbing in intensity and passion. Dornenreich's atmospheric and mysterious style of black metal is what I find the most appealing.

The second half of the second track (around 4:15) is absolutely one of the most amazing transitional parts of any piece of music I've ever heard (even more so than Jesu's "Ruined")!

"It is very hard, maybe even impossible, for one to properly understand the experience that is Durch Den Traum without having listened to it first hand. The band plays atmospheric black metal but in a way that is unique only to them. Their combination of soft, distorted chords; folky breaks and dissonant, heavier sections are arranged in such a way as to create something that has a lot of the same ingredients as other releases but sounds nothing like any of them. The atmosphere on here can be best described as dreamlike. The calm spoken words section quickly giving way to the more nightmarish shouted parts (and I do say shouted as there are almost none of the traditional black metal shrieks). So come experience something unique in a genre where you thought you had heard it all."

Are you asleep?
Am I awake?
Are we a dream?
The world and I?

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