Drowning the Light: Of Celtic Blood & Satanic Pride (2007)

I have covered Drowning the Light a few times on this blog, so I am not going to get too much into their history here.  I first heard about the band from watching Youtube videos of people talking about their music collections and one such Youtuber was a huge fan of the band.  I checked it out and became a big fan myself.  Drowning the Light is truly one of the better Burzum-influenced, raw black metal bands out there.

This release is the fifth full-length Drowning the Light album and came during a particularly prolific year for main-man Azgorh, as four of those full-lengths came out that same year.  He also released several demos and splits.  With that kind of output, it would be understandable, if not excuseable, for the quality of the album to be a little low.  That is not the case here however. 

This is not one of the absolute best Drowning the Light releases I have heard, but it is quite good nonetheless.  It is a bit more emotional with some darker melodies running through it and some much more somber moments.  It is not as furiously angry as some of the other works and can be quite spell-binding at times.  It is also one of the shorter full-length Drowning the Light albums, meaning that it does not overstay its welcome, which is a bit of a problem for some other groups in the genre. 

The production is not great on the album, with the drums a little too high in the mix.  This is a fairly normal thing for this type of black metal though so it is certainly not unexpected.  Still, I wonder what it would sound like a little cleaner.

This is yet another great release from Drowning the Light.  It is a bit more on the somber end of things, but that helps it stand out somewhat from the massive number of other releases from the band.  This is unlikely to be the first album I go to when I want to listen to them, but it won't be the last one either.