album review: 'the dead light' by fen

I'll admit there's a part of me that's still surprised to look back on 2017 and how much I really dug the fifth album Winter from English black metal band Fen. On the surface it made sense - atmospheric black metal with a bit of a progressive stripe, that's not too far afield - but they were also willing to get a little more grisly and swampy, push beyond flirtations with post-rock into something darker and murkier while not sliding straight into doom or death metal. And yet the textural choices they picked were so rich, the melodies so striking, and so much of the lyrical poetry so potent that I found myself really appreciating Winter, so much so that it made my list of my top albums of that year.

But now we're late into 2019, and not only have I had a chance to hear a bit more black metal over the year - still haven't reviewed as much as I'd prefer but again, I've got a plan for that in 2020, stay tuned - I took the opportunity to go back over their output this decade to see if any of it might be worth maybe including on a larger decade list that might be coming next year, especially given the critical acclaim surrounding their 2014 project Carrion Skies. And... well, putting aside how the clean singing thankfully improved from their rather sloppily produced 2009 debut, I remember liking Epoch for some striking compositions and good ideas but thinking the atmosphere, production, and writing had yet to pick up the refinement and groove I found so engrossing. And while Carrion Skies did get closer and is a pretty great album to boot, it never quite got there as dynamically as I was hoping. But hey, that just left me with the hope that The Dead Light would be as visceral and potent as its predecessor, so what did Fen deliver?

Well... okay, this is a tougher album to discuss than I expected, because if you're coming to this project expecting more of Winter, this is not really that, taking a slightly cleaner, more effervescent and progressive tone than the guttural wallow that was the last album. And on the one hand, that's pretty great: Fen has a measured taste for melodic complexity, they integrate other genre flourishes well, and this is certainly an easier album to digest than Winter was, if only on length and song structure. That said, it's an album that feels a little closer to Carrion Skies but with that increased diversity and higher production values, so while I don't think it hits as strongly as Winter did for me, it's still pretty great and may even satisfy Fen's fans more.

But I want to start with the element that always goes underserved when talking about black metal: the lyrics and themes. I've gone on record saying that Fen are phenomenal descriptive writers coming off of Winter, and it's just as true here: especially given the scale they're working with now has gone cosmic; just like Tomb Mold, they've gone to space, but their approach is very different. Indeed, I'd probably place Fen closer in line with an act like Alrakis or maybe even that 2016 In The Woods... album Pure where there are a surprising amount of sonic and thematic parallels. Unsurprisingly, the album is punishingly bleak: facing down the inevitability of not just death, but the ending of all life through the passage of time, with the devastating impact across the cosmos painted in pretty visceral language. But what I find fascinating is how Fen don't just wallow in despair but show a persistent curiosity, both outwards towards the unknowable origin of such life on 'Nebula', where like on Winter the attempt to discover such truths result in shaking them to the core, but also inwards on a song like 'Labyrinthine Echoes', where questions are raised how much we really know, and how much of our lives and sense are potentially just lies we tell ourselves to stay sane. How very postmodern of them to engage in this sort of deconstruction, but Fen goes further for the final two tracks to highlight the bloodsucking, half-formed rituals of faith to which people willingly subjugate themselves because they can't face the truth of inevitable nonexistence; and while that's not framed as good, you can tell Fen at least understands, especially when they've tried to stare into the void and find greater truth and have not found answers yet, where even the suicidal hope to embrace the darkness isn't enough, because said darkness doesn't care! And I ultimately like how The Dead Light approaches the relative lack of answers they receive, where at least some modicum of peace has been found in the search, if nothing else.

So okay, the writing's as great as ever - and seriously, there's some beautifully descriptive but not overly verbose poetry that Fen brings to the table here - how about the sound? Well, I'll be blunt: if you're looking for the stylistic variation and sheer guttural weight that came from Winter, again, this is not that - you're not going to get a change-up as grisly and potent as midway through 'Pathway' from the last album, and I'd also argue there isn't quite the same diversity when it comes to the more ethereal moments, at least on a textural level. Oh, the melodies themselves are as vibrant and remarkably catchy as ever, and shorter song structures only give those moments more of a chance to shine, and Fen can stick a phenomenal slow-build crescendo, like how the gungy bass and liquid guitars fully explode across 'Witness', or how on part two of the title track, even just as an instrumental coda I'd argue it handles its time and build-up of the groove even better than part one! A big part of this is how Fen is very willing to let their bass stand alone and have prominent interweaving passages with the more progressive lead work, which thanks to the pseudo-thrash moments on cuts like 'Labyrinthine Echoes' is more developed than ever. And there are some striking, quieter moments where the darker tolls of the bass pick up great simmer like on 'Nebula' and 'Breath Of Void', the latter of which is probably the most frenetic with blast-beats you'll hear on the album, although the flatter grind on 'Exsanguination' that gets crazy dynamic and multiple groove change-ups on 'Rendered In Onyx' are pretty damn great too. Hell, on a compositional level I'd say Fen is only getting more intricate and progressive, taking their looping passages and interweaving them tighter with great grooves...

But these are compositional observations - where I think Fen stumbles a little in comparison with Winter is textural in terms of tonal diversity. Yes, songs like 'Labyrinthine Echoes' get more spacious and there's some great liquid switch-ups that are pretty close to post-rock in a good way, but if you can't latch onto the lead melody - which can occasionally not rise through the tremolo riffs as strongly as I'd like - and you don't have that distinctive texture from song to song, the album can start to run together a bit. There's certainly an emotional arc and vibe to the album - and it really does get strikingly beautiful by the final song with the brighter chord progressions and more defined melodies, especially during the outro - but if you're taking a project like this to space, I feel there was a missed opportunity to explore more alien tones and weirdness that doesn't translate. And while I'm here, while I don't mind the clean vocals as they've improved considerably over the years, if there was an album to get more layers of symphonic bombast behind him it was this one, especially given the apocalyptic scale of it all. Some critics have cited a choice to embrace more progressive metal elements - again, the modern In The Woods... comparison doesn't feel out of place - but I'd argue that should be the excuse to expand the sonic palette, not just add complexity to the compositions. 

But again, it's hard to criticize an album like The Dead Light because it does so much right and I can see a lot of fans hearing a return to form similar to Carrion Skies - it's likely more on me that others. That said, as much as I will praise this as excellently written, beautifully played, and genuinely impressive in places, I'm not going to say it truly grabbed or stirred me the same way as Winter. It's still pretty great, netting an 8/10 from me and absolutely a recommendation if you're a fan of the more progressive side of atmospheric black metal that can absolutely get visceral and huge, that embraces depressive melancholy without drowning in it. Again, not quite as gripped as I was in 2017, but for a slice of black metal to end out of the year, this is pretty excellent - check it out.