I always love when I get to write about some truly weird shit on Metal Injection, and the latest offering from Noire, the Winnipeg based black metal band, certainly fits the bill. With oodles of quality dark acoustic material being counterbalanced by some deliciously evil black metal, The Tracks Of The Hunted makes for an EP that drives forward with the sort of antediluvian certainty that only the greatest black metal records can truly capture.
The amount of talent present on this record is regularly stunning and serves as a reminder to the potency of this band. The moments where they flip the metaphorical switch from dark acoustics with Agalloch-y chants and otherworldly noises to straight up black metal is tasty and reminds me why I fell in love with the genre in the first place. It's the strength of the compositions that holds this album together, and Noire understand exactly what makes their haunting aesthetic work, encouraging me to come back time and time again.
That being said, it's easy to see how this record might become a little dull. Getting lost in moments of acoustic mastery is all well and good, but one can easily see the mesmerizing acoustic guitar passages turning far more annoying than anyone might initially give them credit for. Noire clearly have a lot of great things going on musically, I just wonder if part of why they chose to do an EP was that their ideas wouldn't hold up in a longer format. I'm still excited to hear more from this band though, and watching them evolve promises to be quite the journey.
Score: 7/10
