A FOREST OF STARS’ from Leeds fourth and new opus is released revealing another “play” to the audience. It is the rightful successor of “A Shadowplay for Yesterdays” taking their unique sound one step further.
“Beware the Sword You Cannot See” can be paralleled with a black metal opera with gothic and avant-garde elements. Theatricality prevails once more setting a new limit and new standards to the atmospheric black metal platform. The storytelling throughout its entirety has masterful peaks, ‘soft’ spots and thrusting melodies.
The atmospherically orchestrated string instrumentation sets this album and this particular band apart from all the others; eerie vocals, shrieking and growling – and at times clean spoken words that sound spookier than imagined – give shape to the theatrical play unfolding in front of one’s eyes while listening to it track by track. The sometimes evil atmosphere is enriched by the use of female vocals in some tracks, making the female voice useful not only to ‘lighter’ genres of metal.
Dissonance is dexterously woven with the melodic aspects of “Beware the Sword You Cannot See”, a characteristic that is more visible in the second part of the album that is divided in six parts (Mindslide, Have You Got a Light, Boy?, Perdurabo, An Automaton Adrift, Lowly Worm, Let There Be No Light) that range from female vocals along with synth compositions to eerie shrieking vocals with a dose of darkness and horror raising the tempo often enough.
Overall, a very interesting, intricate and majestic release – needs a lot of time and several times of spinning and feeling. The gist is that A FOREST OF STARS wrote another provocative theatrical play – in the sense that imagination is challenged to come forward and form images and sit in a theatre while enjoying the show and the transcendent storytelling.
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