Austin Lunn is one of the most original talents working in the U.S. black metal community today. Through his black metal project Panopticon, he's released a series of albums that have gotten increasingly better with each new entry in the discography. Lunn's first release under the Panopticon moniker was a self-titled full length debut that combined atmospheric black metal with elements of shoegaze. This style of black metal is relatively common nowadays, but in 2008 there weren't many bands making this kind of racket. Lunn's leftist political ideology manifested itself from the beginning as well; his lyrics stand in stark contrast to the historically right-wing leanings of the larger black metal community. But Lunn's biggest contribution to the metal community, especially USBM, is his development of a unique form of Appalachian folk black metal. Lunn first began incorporating bluegrass and American folk music into his songs on 2009's Collapse, and he further developed this style of black metal on 2012's excellent Kentucky. Now, with his upcoming release Roads to the North, Lunn has continued pushing Panopticon's sound to the point where it's essentially no longer black metal.
There are certainly still aspects of black metal present in Roads to the North, but this album is a nigh unclassifiable knot of styles. The album opening "Echos of a Dishoarmonic Evensong" begins with a blast of black metal fury, but it's augmented with a prominently featured fiddle. This same song also features melodic death and post-metal elements as well as a spastic guitar solo that encompasses several distinct styles of heavy metal. As this beautifully schizophrenic mass of music draws to a close, Lunn abruptly switches to Appalachian folk music for the beginning of "Where Mountains Pierce the Sky." Then, just as abruptly, the song snaps back to metal. And so it goes for the rest of the album.
In the realm of heavy music, "progressive" has taken on a fairly standard meaning. When you hear that term in relation to heavy metal, you know to expect noodly guitar playing, weird time signatures, and esoteric scales. But Roads to the North is progressive in the purest sense of the word. There are definitely passages of music on the album that fit the prog metal stereotype, like the mid-point of "The Long Road Part 2: Capricious Miles" where a bass line is allowed the space to freely bounce around for several minutes. But, in a more abstract sense, the music on this album is progressive because it transcends all genre boundaries in a way that hasn't been done before. There simply aren't albums that sound like this; Lunn shouldn't be able to get away with book-ending two sprawling post-black metal opuses with the Appalachian folk of "The Long Road Part 1: One Last Fire" and "Norwegian Nights," but somehow he manages to pull it off flawlessly.
Considering the insanely dense wad of styles that intermingle on Roads to the North, it's amazing that the album is even remotely listenable. But the fact that it's so ridiculously good is inconceivable. This album could have gone wrong in so many different ways, and it's to Austin Lunn's credit as a musician that he was able to bend these disparate musical styles to fit his artistic vision. Roads to the North is definitely one of the best metal albums that will come out this year, and you owe it to yourself as a fan of the genre to seek this album out as soon as you can. The digital version of the album is available here and there are links to pre-order the album on vinyl and CD here.
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