Drowning The Light – Violet Mercury & Moonlit Sorcery [EP]

The Australian band never lets its loyal following wait long for a sign of life, earlier this year Azgorh already brought us two EP’s, a split album a full-length album and now, just a few months later we are presented with two EP’s again. The first one is this, in a beautiful purple cover, ‘Violet Mercury & Moonlit Sorcery’. After a good deal of various conceptual releases, this one seems “just” a good and genuine EP with new music without a deeper meaning besides just making it a great new chapter in Drowning The Light’s impressive back catalogue…

And, frankly, that is what ‘Violet Mercury & Moonlit Sorcery’ does. Although it might be an EP that has no ties to any of the band’s previous releases or other conceptual ideas, it is very much connected to Drowning The Light’s most recent releases on a musical level. The two tracks on this EP, still clocking in at well over 20 minutes, are divided in one Black Metal track, the opener ‘Violet Mercury’ and the closing ‘Moonlit Sorcery’ which is a truly authentic late 90’s/early 00’s medieval and melodic Dark Ambient track.

As a whole the EP has the same sort of humming and dreamy character as the last couple of releases from earlier this year. This means we get to enjoy Drowning The Light in its most humble and organic way, again heavily leaning on the use of synthesizers and the aforementioned typical late 90’s/early 00’s Dark Ambient melodies. Although there is no question that we can still file this under the banner of Black Metal, the genre’s share on these recordings are narrowed down to only the band’s most slow and somewhat rocking mid-tempo kind. In fact, with all this, all the recognisable ingredients, including the semi-clean Pagan-like vocal delivery and female vocals (that we previously also heard on the split album with Ghosts Of Oceania, among others) are present to make this EP a more than enjoyable new ride.

So, in conclusion, with the last few Drowning The Light releases still fresh in the memory, it’s no surprise that the proportion of Black Metal has dwindled a bit, but with the addition of this new set of EPs with largely the same musical DNA, it makes you think that Azgorh considers this to be his new musical direction. It should therefore be clear that fans of Drowning The Light’s rawer and edgier Black Metal will have to wait a little longer for this to re-emerge, but ‘Violet Mercury & Moonlit Sorcery’ has undoubtedly become yet another EP that will be able to win the approval of the band’s aforementioned loyal followers.