Ihsahn – After

• Country: Norway
• Style: Progressive metal / Post-black metal
• Label: Mnemosyne Productions / Candlelight Records
• Release date: 25 January 2010

Picture a shoreline nobody has walked for a thousand years. Grey water, a low sky, a wind that carries no voices. That is roughly where After lives, and it is a long way from the fire of Ihsahn’s Emperor years.

He has described the album as the last part of a trilogy begun with The Adversary and angL, and where those records ran on anger and confrontation, this one looks outward and inward at the same time. The lyrics drift through empty landscapes: the sea, frozen lakes, the surface of Mars. This time the guest voice has no words: Jørgen Munkeby of Shining plays saxophone, and it never arrives as a novelty. It wanders through “Undercurrent” and “On the Shores” like a lone figure on the horizon, sometimes mournful, sometimes close to a scream.

The music underneath is heavier than the mood suggests. Writing on eight-string guitars for the first time, Ihsahn found lower, darker registers, and Asgeir Mickelson and Lars K. Norberg of Spiral Architect give the rhythms an elastic, almost jazz-like flex. “The Barren Lands” and “A Grave Inversed” open the album with the harshest material, a reminder of where this man came from, before the record slowly lets the tide take over.

Jens Bogren mixed it, and the sound is spacious without being polished to death. The two longest pieces are the heart of the album, slow tides rather than songs. “Frozen Lakes on Mars” may be the closest Ihsahn has come to something you could hum, a melody hanging in thin, cold air.

This is not an album for a quick listen between other things, and it was never meant to be one. It asks for headphones, a dark room and some patience. Give it those and the landscape slowly fills in, one grey shape at a time.

Best tracks:

The Barren Lands
Frozen Lakes on Mars
Undercurrent
On the Shores

Author’s rating: 8.7/10