### Silent Path: Mourner portraits

#### 04/09/12 || gk

Silent Path is a one man black metal project from Iran helmed by Count De Efrit. The music is depressive black metal with a doomy, post metal feel. This is, for the most part, decent stuff. The music is melancholy, flowing smoothly through an atmosphere that tries to evoke hopelessness and despair and occasionally hits the mark. The problem with this album is that the 9 songs here tend to merge together and feel like one long track. The ambient elements of the music work in a couple of different ways. There’s a pretty cool atmosphere throughout the album but with all of the songs being slow and following essentially the same template, “Mourner portraits” becomes background music very quickly. “Mourner portraits” is a bit too pretty and laid back for the depressive black metal to really work but it’s when the Count is doing the whole ambient black metal thing like on “Forgotten Sounds” that he’s most effective. It’s a creepy, minimal song with a mournful keyboard melody, static and ambient samples and it works. Overall, “Mourner portraits” is a bit hit and miss. There are good ideas here but not everything works. Still, worth tracking down and checking out if you like the depressive/ ambient side of black metal.

6.5/10: Worth checking out.