Wooden Throne (FIN) – Eternal Wanderer of the Night Sky DIGI-CD

Black Metal

Now, as summer’s heat inevitably fades away amid soon-to-be-falling leaves, Wooden Throne returns with an equally mighty successor: Eternal Wanderer of the Night Sky. Almost too perfectly titled, Eternal Wanderer of the Night Sky highlights the nostalgia hinted at by its full-length predecessor while also expanding Lehto’s gaze as high as that night sky AND down to the mossy depths of the forest floor. Much of what made Wooden Throne‘s first album such a classic is still intact – acute sense of space (often literally), impassioned performance, kaleidoscopic production – but Eternal Wanderer of the Night Sky is every inch a counterpart / counterpoint. The real development is the prominent usage of piano: never busy but always front and center, sublimely bittersweet notes lead the onward-and-skyward charge, pulling heartstrings as handily as they send chills down the spine. In this sense, and when coupled with Lehto’s more overtly lead-oriented guitar work here, Wooden Throne‘s second album is not so much a strictly “black metal” record as it is an atmospheric metal one – and, once again, paradoxically uplifting no matter what appellation you apply to it.