### Bereft: Bereft

#### 17/02/12 || BamaHammer

I don’t know at what point black metal becomes pagan or folk metal. It’s probably right about the time you think about putting a Tubescreamer in front of an accordion. This is some type of that repetitious folk-ish black metal that has somehow become popular these days and ultimately falls flat because it’s just so boring. It’s also an extremely long and tedious listen, clocking in at over an hour and featuring generally the same plodding, mid-paced tempo and thick, distorted guitar chording throughout. You know things are going to be bad when the intro track is over well over three minutes of ambient, atmospheric noise. The atmosphere Bereft develops is actually decent, but in the end, this is the same general form of black metal with folk influences that Summoning once did so well long ago. Bereft uses those vast, open soundscapes with the croaky vocals and takes song idea after song idea and bludgeons it mercilessly into the ground by repeating everything entirely too many times. I really can’t recommend this, but I can recommend Summoning. They’re way better at this type of stuff.

4/10: Too many riffs come from the department of redundancy department.