Bandcamp The word blackened sets an expectation about the voice, and REQUIEM almost entirely declines it. Across all seven tracks there is not a single growl, scream or rasp. There is exactly one growl on the record. Everything else Fallmann sings clean, often multi-tracked into something closer to a choir, and the black metal is left to the guitars.
That is not a gap in the record. It is the record. Fallmann writes it, sings it, plays guitar and bass on it and produces it, with David Traut on drums, Julian Hirschmüller mixing and mastering, and guests on violin, flute and acoustic guitar. Twenty four minutes, and the themes she names are vengeance, empowerment and womanhood.
The piece with no band on it
“AS ABOVE, SO BELOW” at track four is under a minute long and has no guitars, no bass and no drums on it. It is layered voice over a sustained low drone, and it measures like nothing else here: twelve decibels quieter than its neighbours, almost no weight at the bottom, and most of its energy sitting in the register where a human voice lives instead.
On a seven track EP that is a bold place to put a piece with no band on it, and the sequencing around it is the reason it works. The record is at its widest at the outer edges, the opener and the two closers, and it narrows steadily towards the centre. The three narrowest tracks on the EP are positions three, four and five, and the drone is the middle one of those. Celestielle built a trough and put the quietest thing she had at the bottom of it.
Where it is strongest and where it sags
“ROTTING FLESH” closes with an unaccompanied vocal opening, a wall in the middle and an acoustic guitar with bells at the end, and it is the widest thing here by a clear margin, eighth widest of any single track we have measured. “REQUIEM” and “CRUCIFY HIM” do something similar at smaller scale.
The middle of the record is where it gives way. “EYE FOR AN EYE” and “THE HUNTRESS” run close to flat, and on those two the master is pressed hard enough that the drums lose their edges. They are not bad songs. They are the two where a project built on contrast stops using contrast, and across twenty four minutes you notice.
So
Recommended. A solo project that delivers a record this big-sounding, with a structural idea at its centre and a voice strong enough to carry a whole EP on one growl, has done something harder than it sounds. The reservation is the sag in the middle third, where two tracks settle into a loud, even level and the record briefly becomes the thing its genre tag would predict. Start at “ROTTING FLESH” to hear what she can do, then play it in order to hear why track four is where it is.
We run every record through a track by track analysis before writing. On REQUIEM the distance between the quietest and the loudest passages goes from 5.5 on the tightest song to 27.2 on “ROTTING FLESH”, which is the eighth widest single track of the fifty one albums we have measured. The EP is at its most open at both ends and at its flattest in the middle three songs.
“AS ABOVE, SO BELOW” measures like nothing else on the record. It runs about twelve decibels quieter than the tracks on either side of it, carries almost no weight at the bottom, and puts most of its energy in the range a human voice occupies. That is what layered singing over a drone looks like when there is no band behind it.
Everything else holds steady. Same brightness from track to track, same balance between low and high, and nothing flattened in the mastering.
Standout tracks: ROTTING FLESH, REQUIEM, AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
Corrected 14 October 2026: the review originally said there were no harsh vocals on the record. Celestielle pointed out there is one growl.
