burning skies. really not very exciting. the first 2 minutes are chaff, 2.10 until that verse riff comes back is kinda cool. the nocturnus style transition riff is nice, but it doesnt relate to what follows. 3.42 sounds like a decent enough riff but its hard to make out and its clearly under utilised.
the good parts are underused and the shite parts are overused, theres not enough journey/development.
keeping the same riff playing and changing the drum pattern is an irritating and overused cliché in post-vital period death/black metal - especially going from something rocking to a blast (it underscores the pointlessness of the speed and the essentially rock derived nature of the content). general rule is unless something meaningful in the riff-work is changing with the drum beat dont make a pointless change to the drum beat.
its mostly too square cut to maintain interest and theres not enough of a fundamental interrelationship between the riffs.
i suggest stripping 90% of the material from this track, just taking the stuff thats awesome and making a track out of that. i suggest also going away and working with a real drummer, in order to get a more natural feel for rhythmic transitions, emphasises and shapes.
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ancient summons - nice opening riffs, better sense of journey and little less square cut but still a bit overdone. 1.05 and 1.46, there are some serious issues with the harmony being employed. the implications of key change are awkward, not particularly pleasant and don't add anything to the journey. loses its way for all of the end section stuff.
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Breaching the walls of sylph - not a bad start. the new riff at 0.38 doesnt relate enough to what came before. i can pick out a relationship between some of the riffs by the way you repeat verbatim one particular ending phrase in different riff contexts; this is nice but alone it does not give a sense of expanding experience - not without some more integral variations in the material its framing (nb. the riff at the end i can hear relates to the one before it, but its not great idea to begin with). theres some nice stuff in here, but theres problems still with the architecture of the song.
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Omnis - nice opening riff, reminds me of Loke by Enslaved, but then you piss all over it with that ARE YOU TALKIN TO ME?-ish counter-riff. thereafter has good and bad with similar problems and positives to the other tracks. the last two/three minutes of this are quite good. more work on the transitional material.
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some very cool riffs but there are some problems with knowing how to string them together. sometimes the changes are arbitrary, sometimes they're insufficient, sometimes they're unrelated, sometimes they just don't impart anything particularly enlightening to the experience. problems also at one or two points with the harmony, its just not functioning properly; a few problems too with rhythm/drums, but that can be fixed by working with a real drummer and just learning to loosen it up a bit. overall i'd say learn to stick with a handful of ideas and draw variations out of them rather than creating new material. real potential here though.
do some homework listening to this album: learn a couple of tracks, figure out what makes it work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O176hufoFq8