Sacramentum - Far Away From The Sun
Review: Sacramentum emerged as a wave of bands attempting to reinfuse black metal with its inherent melodicity approaching the integration of complexity in a manner dissimilar to that of subgenre public figure Dissection who eschewed the evolution in modern black metal by making more rock-like metal music with intricacy and classical touches. In more of the evolutionary curve of the black metal movement Sacramentum expanded from their classic melodic black metal effort, "Finis Malorum," to make rhythmically Dissection-inspired music with a more sublime interpretation of the classical atonal lineage to black metal.
The challenge to this form of music requires an intensity of thematic development absent from more recent Dissection material but here present in the artistic interpretation of black metal's romanticist melodrama, the presence of great and often unresolved but wistfully harmonious themes. Songs are distinct and cohesive, with surprises in how well each collection of structures sound in sequence; playing is meticulous execution of intricacy outside-head (finger motions, tempo shifts, chord changes) as well as inside-head (abstract conception, intellectual development, structural awareness). In each arch and beautiful song is an epic of fantastic permutation and emotional development of thematic codices, while in each song also is some form of a vibrant energetic death and black metal insurgency, mating all of the brains and all of the blast in this incarnation of metal.
1. Fog's Kiss
2. Far Away From The Sun 
3. Blood Shall Be Spilled
4. When Night Surrounds Me
5. Cries From a Restless Soul
6. Obsolete Tears
7. Beyond All Horizons
8. The Vision and the Voice
9. Outro - Darkness Falls For Me/Far Away From the Sun
To some this overtly passionate statement might seem adolescent, but to this reviewer it is the expression of maturity stultified by an unimaginative, robotic, unexciting world transformed by artistic diligence and inspiration to address the fundamental issues in life which those in denial would rather ignore: mortality, the essence of existence, the experience of living, the desire for experience. Combined with excellent playing, brilliant conception, and a powerful variety through distinctiveness of invention, this makes for an amazing vision of creation and Sacramentum have brought it manifest in a lucid but emotive tribute to the rebellious humanness of soul.