LAMP OF MURMUUR

LAMP OF MURMUUR's mysterious figurehead M. has been making steady progress along the contemporary black metal spectrum. He came out of nowhere in 2019, with a flurry of demos that deftly laid out the LAMP blueprint, and a sound that was certainly a little fuller and more adventurous than the raw black metal average. Those demos made it plain that this project was committed to many of the genre's oldest and most primitive principles, and across the years that followed, he has expanded that initial vision.

Debut album "Heir of Ecliptical Romanticism" and its rapid (and superior) follow-up "Submission and Slavery" were hungrily consumed by underground heads everywhere, and by the time M. unleashed his third full-length, "Saturnian Bloodstorm", it had become abundantly clear that LAMP OF MURMUUR were a very serious proposition indeed. Black metal nerds may have been able to point to a passing resemblance of IMMORTAL, at least in terms of riffs, but M.'s methodical, evolutionary approach had enabled him to forge a distinct identity that just happened to be atmospherically linked to some of the greatest bands black metal has ever had to offer.

"The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy" heralds another major change: this time, LAMP OF MURMUUR has expanded again, to include the grandeur and graceful clangor of all the symphonic black metal that spewed forth in the wake of EMPEROR's "In the Nightside Eclipse" and DIMMU BORGIR's seminal (original) "Stormblåst". The resemblance is still only surface deep, but the ambition behind it is unmistakable. Quite conceivably the project's last major statement before M. is potentially cajoled into signing for a much bigger label, "The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy" is a grand declaration of war.

Part of LAMP OF MURMUUR's appeal up until this point has been its devotion to weaving different substrains of blackened fury together. Previous albums have exhibited a strong kinship with the post-punk world, and that affiliation continues here. But this is an album that eschews heavy-handed hybrids in favor of a holistic approach. "Forest of Hallucinations" and "Reincarnation of a Witch" are prime examples. The riffs are scabrous and epic in scope, the underlying atmosphere is ice cold and threatening, and M.'s vocals are firmly in the realms of animalistic anguish, and yet the sum of those parts is weirdly fresh and unfamiliar, as if the Los Angeles resident has elegantly rebuilt his sound from scratch.

A new peak of potency is reached on the three-part title track, which is both the most accessible music that M. has made to date and a determined effort to distinguish his work from the mediocre hordes. "The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy Part 1 – Moondance" is symphonic black metal with roots in Norwegian frostlands, but its mid-paced core is gothic to a fault, and as calmly and classily melodic as this sort of frenzied barrage ever gets. "…Part 2 – Twilight Orgasm" digs deeper into that post-punk predilection, with haunted passages that strongly recall FIELDS OF THE NEPHILIM at their most PINK FLOYD-esque, and a wickedly restrained sense of glacial pace, with M.'s clean vocals burnishing opaque melodic depths. In contrast, "…Part 3 – The Fall" plunges wholeheartedly into an ornate squall of symphonic grandiloquence, its billowing storm of guitars harboring more melodic surprises, skeletal harpsichord embellishments included. It sounds huge and elevates LAMP OF MURMUUR's established personality to a higher level of efficacy. Meanwhile, the closing "A Brute Angel's Sorrow" is a bleak, neofolk coda that hints at further explorations in the near future.

Black metal has plenty of one-man operations, but few are as comprehensive in their creative process as this. "The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy" is an all-encompassing leap into the exhilarating unknown as LAMP OF MURMUUR grow exponentially before our ears. Whether or not M. actually wants to ambush the mainstream remains a mystery, but he is making music that demands a much bigger audience than the underground masses that have, in truth, already signed up for more.