The Flight Of Sleipnir
Lore

THE REVIEW

The black color of music, of this art so wonderful yet sometimes dark and impenetrable. Fear, legends, and the landscapes of a lost world form the foundations of the impenetrability that Cushman and Csicsely outline in their epic diary titled "Lore".

The work in question is the second record released by the duo under the moniker The Flight Of Sleipnir: the conception of black metal making love with the mysticism and mists of Nordic traditions, giving birth to a stoner/doom with piercing and poignant calls. The two's voices exchange the spotlight more and more often, the acoustic echoes, the fragrance of dust, antiquity, power. Defining and enclosing "Lore" within a single genre is something utterly difficult and would diminish its scope.

The references to different masters are numerous, yet the two musicians are careful not to emulate them without crafting their own path: "Legends" is a phenomenal calling card, a passageway to hell. Bony, it effortlessly breaks free from the reminiscences of the harsh black metal of Acheronian Dirge to venture into a lost world that recalls the heroic laments of Quorthon from "Twilight of the gods". The past emerges with renewed strength into a not well-defined future, looming with the Mephistophelean shadows of "Of words and ravens", desert sand soup and "basement" psychedelic rock where there is also room for the powerful sound of the electric guitar, tasked with dulling the brightness of the acoustic one.

Listening to this CD, but to a lesser extent also in the other two by Sleipnir, one feels that what matters most to Cushman and Csicsely is the general atmosphere that each single track manages to unleash. All the pieces of "Lore" possess their own precise characterization that guides them onto a well-defined track: sometimes the ghosts of the American peripheral night materialize, other times the starry sky of the endless Scandinavian expanses appears, as happens in "Fenrisulfr", a Norse poem translated into music first on the dazzling notes of a fierce black and then tempered into a prayer as delicate as it is apocalyptic. Yet there is still time for the perfect acoustic lament of "Black swans" and for another tale of "prairie and hearth" like "Let us drink till we die", a piece coming from another time, a forgotten era that the band manages to evoke sublimely.

"Lore" is all this: a mix of black, doom, fire, ghosts, and visions. An inseparable union that must be embraced as a whole, because each influence serves to highlight another. A work where the stars are the electric and acoustic guitars that share the spotlight: their complementary work is the main musical theme of "Lore". An album relying on originality, but also on a sensation of ephemerality, the great presence of nothingness. A jewel born on the cold American nights and forgotten by some ancient God in the snow of the Scandinavian lands. One must dig, one must seek it...

1. "Legends" (7:25)
2. "Of Words And Ravens" (5:09)
3. "Asgardreid" (2:29)
4. "Fenrisulfr" (7:08)
5. "The End Begun" (4:52)
6. "Black Swans" (3:39)
7. "No Man Will Spare Another" (5:51)
8. "Winter Nocturne" (1:59)
9. "Let Us Drink Till We Die" (4:18)