Amber Asylum
Still Point
Profound Lore
Chamber maids clean up
Amber Asylum might sound like the polar opposite of Asunder's crushing doom and Wold's terrifying prairie black metal, but the San Francisco foursome are just as capable of establishing dark moods to rival their Profound Lore labelmates. Firmly rooted in the sedate yet experimental terrain of avant-garde chamber music and post rock, the overall effect of their distinct brand of doom and gloom is far more subversive: what starts out as breathtakingly lovely leaves us emotionally shattered an hour later.
Coming on the heels of 2006's gorgeous Garden of Love EP, Still Point benefits tremendously from some ingenious sequencing, gracefully transitioning from wistful melodies to haunting drones. The mental images the music conjures are indelible: "In the Still Point He Remains" basks in lukewarm, understated beauty (a sunny summer afternoon, cooled by a biting wind), singer/multi-instrumentalist Kris Force sounds mournful on "Black Phoebe" (clouds start to form), the faithful cover of the Richard and Linda Thompson classic "The Great Valerio" signals the album's spellbinding second half ("The sky's beginning to bruise," to quote Withnail), while the strikingly beautiful dirge "Garden of Love" and the chilly Earth-like drones that dominate "Diminishing Returns" bring the CD to a devastatingly bleak climax (it's dark, it's cold, it's late, we want to go home!). It's rare that we get an album that is able to appeal to lovers of folk, neoclassical, post rock, and doom metal all at once, but that's the extraordinary mix that Amber Asylum have mastered yet again. —Adrien Begrand
