Vrörsaath - 2020 - Under Vast Dreamskies

Dark Adversary Productions – DA126  2.02GB FLAC

 Under Vast Dreamskies imagines black metal not as a descent into earth, tomb, forest, or historical ruin, but as an ascent into a night sky large enough to contain castles, storms, wandering spirits, and private kingdoms. Vrörsaath’s raw guitars and harsh voice remain tied to the physical urgency of black metal, yet the synthesizers continually pull the music away from the ground. They do not decorate the riffs with a little medieval atmosphere. They enlarge the space around them until the band seems to be performing somewhere between a fortress and a constellation.

The title’s invented compound, “dreamskies,” is important. A night sky is shared physical reality, visible to anyone who looks upward. A dream belongs to one consciousness and obeys private laws. Joining the two creates a world that feels universal and solitary at the same time. The stars appear objectively distant, yet the figures we discover among them come from imagination, memory, fear, and desire. The Seer uses that meeting point to build music that can sound triumphant without becoming cheerful and fantastical without losing its raw underground grain.

The opening title track establishes the album’s dimensions patiently. Keyboard lines rise above abrasive guitar movement, giving the impression that melody is illuminating a structure too large to be seen all at once. The harsh vocals do not dominate the scene like a conventional front person. They appear as one inhabitant calling from somewhere within the architecture. This makes the music feel less like a band performing a song than a realm briefly becoming audible. The instruments describe height, distance, stone, moonlight, and motion without requiring literal sound effects or narrated fantasy.

There is a distinctive relationship between rawness and grandeur here. Cleaner production might make the keyboards more luxurious and the riffs more individually impressive, but it could also reduce the world to a professional soundtrack. Vrörsaath keeps enough roughness for the music to feel discovered rather than manufactured. The edges remain grainy, as though the album were transmitted from a damaged tower or recovered from a cassette found inside a sealed chamber. Grandeur emerges through imagination rather than expense.

“Throne Among the Stars” concentrates the album’s fantasy into an image of impossible sovereignty. A throne normally marks the fixed center of a kingdom, the place from which land, subjects, and borders are surveyed. A throne among stars has no stable floor and no population beneath it. Its ruler possesses a magnificent position but may rule nothing except distance. The song’s combination of martial motion and luminous synth suggests both coronation and isolation. Power becomes inseparable from being removed from ordinary life.

That ambiguity protects the album from becoming uncomplicated escapism. Fantasy can offer liberation from the limitations of daily reality, but it can also expose the loneliness hidden inside dreams of absolute authority. The Seer performs everything alone, constructing drums, guitars, keys, voice, landscape, and imagined court from one source. The project’s solitary method mirrors its celestial king: one figure creating an entire kingdom because no existing kingdom is sufficient.

“Empyrean Storms” gives the album its most dramatic cosmological image. The empyrean traditionally refers to the highest heaven, a region beyond ordinary elements and earthly change. A storm occurring there violates the expectation that transcendence should be peaceful. Even the uppermost realm contains turbulence. Vrörsaath’s melodic brightness and black-metal abrasion become especially meaningful in this context. The synthesizers reach toward divine altitude while distortion keeps introducing weather, conflict, and material resistance.

This is one reason dungeon synth and black metal work so naturally together when neither is treated as an accessory. Dungeon synth imagines spaces, histories, towers, roads, and supernatural distances. Black metal introduces bodies, struggle, danger, and weather into those spaces. Without the synth, this album’s castle might remain a silhouette. Without the metal, it might become an uninhabited illustration. Together they produce architecture under pressure.

“Wanderer’s Dawn” changes the direction of the journey. Dawn usually promises return, clarity, and relief after darkness, but a wanderer has no guaranteed home toward which morning can guide them. Light reveals the distance still to travel. The track carries a feeling of movement through an awakening landscape, but its atmosphere remains too haunted for sunrise to function as a simple victory. Night has not been defeated. It has entered memory and changed the person emerging from it.

The wanderer is also an ideal figure for this kind of music. Unlike the warrior or king, the wanderer is defined by movement rather than possession. Landscapes are encountered but not conquered. Ruins offer temporary shelter. A path may be followed without knowing whether it leads toward revelation or deeper exile. Vrörsaath’s recurring melodic figures create that sense of travel by returning in altered emotional light. Repetition becomes distance covered rather than motionlessness.

“Memories of My Astral Journey” closes the album after the journey has already become past tense. This is not the astral journey itself but its residue, suggesting that the preceding tracks may have been recollections rather than immediate events. Memory does not preserve an experience evenly. It selects a throne, a storm, a dawn, a staircase, a moonlit tower, then allows the connecting hours to vanish. The final piece feels like looking backward at a realm whose entrance can no longer be located with certainty.

Samuel E. Thomas’s monochrome cover makes this uncertainty visible. A castle rises between severe mountains, mist, a huge moon, ruined stone, and a staircase leading toward a doorway concealed by the structure above it. The architecture is simultaneously inviting and forbidding. The stairs promise entry, but the image gives no evidence that the traveller will be welcomed or permitted to return. Fortress and landscape have almost fused, as though the castle were not built upon the mountain but dreamed by it.

Under Vast Dreamskies succeeds because its fantasy is not merely nostalgic medieval pageantry. Its kingdom belongs to interior life: the structures people build from solitude, ambition, memory, and the need for reality to contain more than the visible world seems to offer. Vrörsaath transforms one musician’s private materials into a sky large enough for other listeners to enter. The throne may remain empty, the storm may occur above heaven, and the journey may survive only as memory, but for thirty-nine minutes the stairs are still there.