On Rare Field Ceiling, Yellow Eyes are once perfectly tapped into both their own intuition and the highlights of the more intricate pieces of black metal history.
The usual ingredients are there: first, the meandering melodic riffs that are not particularly angry, not particularly dark, but definitely nothing easy to digest either. And then there’s always the right amount of religious folkloric field recordings to tie the different tracks together into one tapestry. Yellow Eyes takes you to places that only they can.
The lyrics match perfectly: impressionistic, without pomp or circumstance, but a mix of perspectives where the organic and the artificial blend to the point where we’re reminded how senseless such divisions are in the first place. There are only transitions. Beautifully, the album illustrates the pressure of upward movement, boiling, building, fuming, and rising. And inevitably, the fall.
There are few radical breaks of style on Rare Field Ceiling, but that’s not what I want from Yellow Eyes anyway. The album feels like part of a continuum, particularly with the last two albums, a logical next stage of the journey, and it’s one of the best, most emotionally rewarding journeys that I know of.
Rare Field Ceiling is out since June 28 on CD/LP through Gilead Media.
