Gold Are The Ashes Of The Restorer evokes an eldritch combination of screaming wind-tunnel black metal and epicly bombastic post-post-rock of the Explosions In The Sky variety. Given Mories De Jong‘s penchant for all things bleakly symphonic and immensely mordant-sounding, that seems like a fair starting point for beginning to describe just how much of a rinsing-out Golden Ashes give the listeners’ collective brainpan here.
Helter-skelter blastbeats and frenetic drum machine programming provide the restless undertow to the swirling ranks of hugely choral keyboards that well up in a seemingly endless parade of monster melodies that propel the album into aural spaces bedecked with a suitably gilded air. It’s as if the host of heaven has taken their trumpets and augmented them with every possible variety of polyphonic synthesizer yet conceived on earth, and shoved them through all the effects marked “one louder” at once. In this respect, Gold Are The Ashes Of The Restore offers up eight quintessential Mories compositions, the howling vocals and widescreen panoply of urgent layered percussion and chordal drone recalling his outings as both Cloak Of Altering and Seirom.
Even at his most sublime, Mories never leaves a moment for existential angst and eschatalogical dread unturned, and on a track with a title like “Drifting Slowly Through The Portal Of Sorrow Towards The Void Of Death”, he’s not afraid to let the emotions roll either. The path taken is sorrowful and sombre, while leaving the vocals as a whispered scream of unintelligible agonising filtered low into the mix pushes eerie buttons that probably didn’t exist in this format and with as lugubriously emotive results in quite this fashion before. So where Gnaw Their Tongues records are viscerally, relentless brutal, or De Magia Veterum extend and enlarge on how to be punishingly extreme in all ways metal and macabre, Golden Ashes veer unerringly towards that blinding source of light. This is a journey undertaken knowing full well that it is probably about to result in an encounter with both the onrushing lantern of an oncoming train of doom and a final burst of electrical activity in the rods and cones of eyeballs that await the afterlife, and all its mysterious promises, as earthbound existence prepares to depart. Which of course might not happen just yet, if the title “Seven Bodies Before I Reach Divinity” is to be believed, its virtual orchestrations sputtering and spiralling in almost unbearably immense swoops and swarms, those hurtling words still expectorating into the unlimited, uncaring void. Perhaps inevitably, the end which comes at “The Charred Gates Of Benevolence” fades out into a dying gasp of keyboard chords jacked up to the ninth cloud of heaven (or potentially, circle of hell), and there remains a suspicion that what lies beyond just might not be altogether pleasant — though doubtless Mories will be working on an album about it already.-Linus Tossio-
