It’s a fact: dark ambient and doom bands love H. P. Lovecraft. He’s certainly THE writer to draw inspiration from when writing an album in that genre. Musterion is one of the few bands to really achieve making that influence come out in the sound without making it stupidly obvious or cheesy, as opposed to the millions of bands using it as a marketing stunt.

Variety is the keyword for The Black Lodge. It incorporates elements from darkwave, dark ambient, neo-folk and minimalistic electronica. The result is a big, fat bag of awesomeness. In other words, Musterion mixes the traditional „you’re in a tomb and all alone“ kind of dark ambient with lots of different kinds of atmospherical music to produce an absolutely unique and ear-soothing mix.

Atmospherically, it’s terribly hermetic and cryptic, but it can be enjoyed without really paying much attention, albeit not at the same degree. There are lots of creepy parts where you’ll expect something to come out of nowhere, and some others that will just make you relax.

We’ve seen some acts create cheap ambient by just lowering the volume to 10% and using random spoken parts and noises, but in The Black Lodge, the composition plays a central role. Every part of the seemingly concept album has a weight and personality of its own. That was actually a big surprise, seeing as many bands tend to make songs that could be interchanged with no real damage done to the album.

Pretty much the only bad part about The Black Lodge is the presence of two or three out-of-place keyboard lines, but really, they don’t do much to an amazing record.

(8.95/10)

Ignacio Coluccio