Review Summary: Refreshing yet incomplete
Zeal and Ardor, restless in their genre bending journey, seem unsatisfied with the idea of completely rehashing their past efforts, and venture onwards with
GREIF, bringing more of their blues, electronic and avant garde side to the forefront, while toning down a lot of their signature black metal influence… See this sounds like a really adventurous idea, as do many of the ideas the band has tried to execute. And sometimes they do succeed, but this is not exactly the case here.
First, let's give credit where it's due, first. For me, the problem with
GREIF is not in the style they choose itself. In fact this album could've been, and sometimes is, a very refreshing branching out from the usual soft-loud-soft formula that Zeal and Ardor are known for. You will find the familiar “black n blues” with a twist in
Hide in Shade, and a much more brooding dark vibe in
Clawing out , a jarring heavy track that constantly messes with the tempo.
Kilonova is an eerie dark rocker, with hooks that almost feel straight out of a modern Opeth album. On top of that, we see a few slightly unusual songs where they actually pull off that stylistic change.
Are you the only one now? is a lullaby-like ballad with a slight black metal edge. And
go home my friend integrates some creepy synth melodies on top of what would otherwise be a pretty cookie cutter chanter.
Alas, the problems show. The quality of the album kind of diminishes around its midpoint, and whatever brief pleasure you might find in a song is not enough to make up for the total lack of structure this album has. The “interludes” in this album are endless, and at times almost don't serve the purpose of transitioning to the next song, to the point where I don't understand why they're there. Are they actually songs? And how many factors end up separating a song from an interlude, when the interlude can be around 1:30 minutes, and a song is 2:30? It's a lose-lose situation, where the interludes feel like underdeveloped ideas that were left to their fate, while some songs themselves barely feel any more complete. On the other hand, the album’s production, just like its predecessor, feels kind of muddy and unbalanced when it comes to heavier moments, so the moments where things get heavy lose some of their impact.
All the things mentioned above make the listening experience all the more frustrating. All the potential lies in pieces, scattered across GREIF, yet untapped. It's not about the stylistic change, or even the signature heterogeneity of their sound. It just feels incomplete. Refreshing yet incomplete.
