Athenaeum Of Sin Reviews

The moment the listener presses the play button, the opening piece, The Ritual, greets, but warms the listener with the sound of nature bustling through the music and clean guitar and dark ambience passages, setting for what’s about to come. One continues their journey with the second piece, A Graven Wintertide, and the remaining six pieces provide the listener’s ears and soul with fast and intense black metal.

Burial Oath started as a one-person project in 2015.  However, today, Burial Oath comes to us as phantoms of their past selves. In 2017, the band released their first full-length album, Beyond the Vale of the Shadowlands, now in 2024, the album is reborn from the dark and grim mists.

When the listener transcends through the dark and mist of music, one will find that Beyond the Vale of Shadowlands, provides the listener with eight dark songs, spread across thirty minutes. Each song is different, providing the listener with effective changes of moods, tones, tempos, compositions, and instrumentation proved by fruit of art devilmanship.  These changes can just happen —but timely place, and at the right moment, for an explanation. In the third song, Coffin Nails, your ears are consumed by the sound of black metal. Then one moment, the listener will be overcome by this brief moment of aura of darkness and doom metal, that lures over the song — this is only the half of it. The riffs have this Black Sabbath feeling and devilmanship within the string work, before transcending back to their dark, heavy and blackened sound. And this is what makes you keep listening, hooked, on your toes.

At the same time, Burial Oath will indulge the listener in scorching guitar work entwined with captivating vocal performances. Thunderous drumbeats create a pulsating rhythm that will sweep you off your feet, and a musical fruit of art that will drag you back to the bands’ darkly mist, where they come from.

Let’s take a moment, and discuss the production value of the album. As the album is reborn from the dark and grim mists of the unknown. The overall sound within the musical spectrum, that the overall sound, production work is floored to perfection and executed. Again, every note, beat, and atmosphere can be heard and make sure that it penetrates the listener’s soul effectively. The effective changes (mentioned before) throughout the thirty minutes, 

Burial Oath provides the listener with the execution of this fruit of art composition with the lyrics, music and instrumentation, which are all provided by this fruit of art devilmanship. At the same time and as mentioned before, I’m new to this band, so I’m unaware of what the original version sounds like, but this, for me—is a loud, heavy, dark and forbidden fruit of the art of black metal music with an overall executed sound.

But one thing is for sure, the band and their music are bleak and heavy. At the same time, Burial Oath demonstrates of providing the listener’s ears and their soul with the ferocity of Scandinavian black metal wrapped up in foreboding atmospheric touches of Cascadian-like nature-worship folk/black metal and doom metal. This captures this primal mysticism that is both brutal and arcane in equal measure.