This is immense. Everything about ‘Hymn to Pan’ is gargantuan. Take the cover art: ancient etchings of even more ancient imagery, hoofs and horns, pan pipes of bones and trailing ivy are intricately carved onto the front cover art.
Take the song titles: ‘Hymn To Pan’; ‘The Ravens’; ‘Heavens Architrave’; ‘Revelation: The Will To Nothingness’. They speak of magnitude, of something bigger than the human, the everyday.
Take the running times: the shortest track is seven minutes long. Two of the six tracks extend to a full ten minutes, and the closer is an era unto itself, spanning a massive 22 minutes and 52 seconds.
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Birdsong and a gentle, lilting guitar give a pastoral introduction that simmers with foreboding… until the gritty, grainy guitar lumbers in as heavy as you like. The quieter passages are eerie and haunting. The loud sections are simply earth-shattering. From the Sabbathesque ‘Ravens’ to the pulverising riffage of ‘The Man Within’, it’s a true behemoth of an album. Well you wouldn’t expect anything less from a band called Obelyskkh, would you?
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