TECHNICAL MUSIC REVIEW


Ashen Horde is set to release their third full length album “Fallen Cathedrals” on March 22nd.  If you haven’t heard the album’s featured singles “Profound Darkness” and “Parity Lost” you can at these links right now.  While the project’s earlier works were focused 100% on black metal, the duo decided to change it up this time around.  The upcoming album is a progressive blackened death metal release, which is quite a change in sound.  I totally think it works, and is a pretty good album.

The guys have created an atmosphere that brings you back to the early 1990’s black metal scene with progressive song structures.  This is an exotic sound in metal that isn’t one of the “popular” subgeneres that the kids go crazy for.  Ashen Horde sticks to their guns and brings a different kind of intensity and dynamic that some bands fail to do so.  I’ve already heard Steve’s voice plenty of times in the billions of bands he’s in/been in and most recently the Equipoise masterpiece.  For a guy with a higher range, he actually gets down low enough which is impressive.  Just when you thought Boiser was a dynamic vocalist and frontman, he comes out of the woodwork with another different style of music he puts his voice to.  Diversity is the spice of life!

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ASHEN HORDE:
Trevor Portz- All instrumentation
Steve Boiser- All vocals

The other half of this impressive band is is Trevor Portz, who is responsible for the instruments.  Can you say WOW? With a black metal influenced band, you can generically assume the style…..lots of tremolo riffing, and repetitive progressions you hear in black metal.  He totally goes against the grain of what black metal is, and enhances the sound! There’s melodic sections and even more melodic guitar leads, and chords that aren’t all tremelo! The clean picked sections add to the emotion, perfectly setting up for their explosive style of metal. The drums are pretty great too.

This album from Ashen Horde in a short summary is definitely their most mature and best piece of music to date.  They tried something new, added more dynamics and melody, and “Fallen Cathedrals” was dropped upon the unworthy human race.  This will go under many radars, but small guys like us are trying to push these great albums the best we can.


Originally published on Technical Music Review. Republished with permission.