November Fire - Through a Mournful Song

A mob of despairing souls, now indistinguishable from mere creatures, crawls forth and hungers for equality.

A bygone era, namely the one spanning the 70s, is exhumed, allowing deluges of memories to flow in and potentially encircle the listener in nostalgia.

Every time I listen to this, I feel like I'm hearing something different. There's a storm of things going on here, making it exceedingly difficult to catch every aspect in one session, so you could say the replay value of this is up there. This is in every way a strength.

The compositions are bountifully wayward, quite like the wind, and therefore, you don't know where you'll end up. Think of yourself as a feather trying to find its way back home. Only one caprice doesn't work so well, and that is one of the vocal tendencies found in the first track, which reminds me a little of Elvis, but there are a lot of cool "voices" that augment this bizarre and sometimes slightly ethereal offering, so overlooking this small transgression, so to speak, happens pretty naturally.

One of the primary draws of the record is how unashamedly unclean it is. Tinge that crudeness with psychedelia and you've got something both incredibly unique yet clearly not born of modernity's trajectories.

Through a Mournful Song is not unlike a time traveler that is unusual enough to have never even been completely at home in its own time, and perhaps that fact is what inspired its leap across time in the first place. Unruly ebbs and flows, classily cacophonous inclinations, and unbridled wanderlust amalgamate to create an unforgettable journey.

Favorite Tracks: "Faint as the Stars" and "Wake Up"

9.5/10

Noah Nihility Zalve