At a time when black metal has for the most part left the dangerous terrain it discovered and relapsed into the same rhythm and slight harmony music that dominates the mainstream airwaves, Summoning have returned to the attack by favoring subtlety over synchronized drama. Where black metal has since 1996 veered toward a modernist conception of music, where disparate voices fuse into convenient singularity and maintain a product-oriented consistency and convenience, the latest Summoning album is a work of art that cherishes its ambiguity like a place for travelers to wander.

The previous two Summoning albums, like journeymates Graveland, tried to find a medieval sound that could work by unifying guitars and keyboards and drums into a happy, rock 'n roll harmony; while these were not bad, they fell short of what made the older albums great. Although nearly invisible to an outsider, what has happened on "Oath Bound" is nothing short of a reactionary revolution: the band has returned to its medievalist aesthetic, in which different instruments stay slightly at odds with each other and drift between partial harmony and incomplete dissonance, and through this choice has re-awakened its sense of epic.

Black metal has often been described as the better aspects of death metal crossed with Dead Can Dance, and only Graveland and Summoning remain to plumb that territory, with remarkably similar results: when they get too close to the texture of soundtracks, which being designed as support for visual entertainment are product-oriented and consistent like mail-order wallpaper, they turn into repetitive and meaningless music that is all appearance and no content. Much as Graveland is starting to liberate itself, Summoning has begun a re-exploration of the chaotic and naturalistic nature of black metal, and as such is no longer trying to make a consistent feeling but a varied, journeylike experience for adventures of the mind.

The introduction to this album resembles something by Penitent or another gothic band, with a keyboard melody repeated over a background drum texture; eventually chanting voices in the echoes of forgotten tombs also intrude, but not before the basic pattern of this album is established. Each song begins with a theme which has a countertheme that ends a pair of phrases, and the two are then concluded by a summary motif; this repeats several times and then leads into a second pair of themes which play off the summary motif, and these go through several permutations - including interventions by rhythmic interludes or silences - before returning to the original theme or concluding abruptly in discontinuity.

Guitars find a language that is both everything that black metal achieved, and expansive toward a larger vocabulary of music, using open strumming more consistently than any metal album in recent history, to which they add fast synchronistic strumming, sweep-picking and inventive downstrum fills. Keyboards are not an echo but a complement to the primary string instrumentals, and drums have faded Kraftwerk-style into a smattering of enigmatic patterns repeated like a tapestry behind the shifting landscape of music. Although the aesthetics and melodic compositional style of this band are together so distinct as to appear recombinant from a distance, this album delivers a new chapter of full-bore dark exploration that dominates almost anything from the last ten years of this genre.

Track Listings
1. Bauglir
2. Across The Streaming Tide
3. Mirdautas Vras
4. Might And Glory
5. Beleriand
6. Northward
7. Menegroth
8. Land Of The Dead


It has been nearly five years since the last Summoning release. In between we have had new DVKE, Kreuzweg Ost, and numerous other projects by Silenius and Protector. Now however comes the band that they are most known for: Summoning. Blending epic landscapes, bombastic medieval percussion, and distant black metal guitar riffs Summoning are truely in a league of their own. Protector commented that on this album the guitars would adopt a more floating style. They indeed do, playing a more arpeggio-based style than ever before. It must also be noted that the artwork is once again superb, a landscape that lets the listener create the action in his own mind while listening.