Twilight Fauna are a project by Paul ‘Ravenwood’ Neese with a handful of highly interesting releases (including some splits) on their roster. Ravenwood originally started this solo-project in order to pay tribute to other one-man-armies, such as The Ruins Of Beverast or Burzum (hè, two of my all-time favourite solo-outfits!).
Hymns Of A Forgotten Homeland is Twilight Fauna’s newest (fourth full) pièce d’art noir, released on vinyl via West Virginia-based Fragile Branch Recordings (and digitally released by Ravenwood shortly after the LP-edition came out - FYI). The long player consists of six songs that last in between four and nine minutes. The opener Coming Home (A Wilted Harvest) starts with an obscure and epic acoustic introduction, and after almost two minutes it transforms into an icy piece, based on slow yet highly-melodic and repetitive trem-riffs and cold, distant, little tortured shouting. Slowly, very slowly, it builds up, but never it explodes. The atmosphere is rather melancholic yet of a mean, nasty kind. And that’s the way this album continues. The songs are primitive, repetitive, nihilistic and minimal (all these descriptions are meant as compliment, of course), pretty slow in execution, and penetrated with great acoustic intermezzos. Once in a while, there are even cleanly sung voices (though it’s little false, let’s admit), like in the acoustic song An Autumn Longing or in Of River Willows. And a composition like Roots Stained By Time, for example, is a fine definition of how to combine epic riffing with minimal-noisy discordance and primal nihilism. This is Black Metal, but not the kind we’re usually trusted with…
Finally this: the sound. The lo-fi production fits to this kind of Aural Art, yet it might be too under-produced from time to time. I like the naturally-organic sound, but sometimes details get missed by the low mix. Bass and drums, for example: where are they all the time? And some drum patterns, sorry, but just sound as if they have been recorded in a hollowly echoing tin box… It’s just a detail, and I do not think it might heavily infect your opinion, but keep this in mind in case you do care.