Bandcamp Eleven tracks is a lot of record, and the first thing Black Smoke Rising gets right is that it uses the length. Gjenferd’s Bergen-bred stoner-doom is not content to ride one tempo for forty minutes: it swings from warm, earthy heaviness through shoegaze-tinted post-metal into two genuinely beautiful instrumental breathers, and that range is what carries the album past the limits of a single riff-worship mood.
The peaks are where it earns its keep. “Bliss” is the clearest, an organic, dry, live-sounding stoner cut with the dynamics fully intact, a snotty overdrive that keeps its string definition, honest tempo changes and a long jam outro that breathes the way a band in a room breathes. “Calling Your Name” works the album’s best trick, intimate, bass-led verses opening into a fuzzed wall of a chorus, the warmth and spatial depth of the mix doing real work, and “Spread Like Wildfire” rides the same dynamic ebb and flow into a sprawling instrumental close. Threaded between the heavy tracks are “Stillferd” and “Attergangar,” a fingerpicked-acoustic-and-strings piece and a melancholy woodwind arrangement, both left completely uncompressed and both lovely, the kind of interludes that signal a band thinking about an album rather than a playlist.
It is not all at that level. The opener “Crimson Rain” comes out the gate as a flattened, modern wall-of-sound with the clean vocals isolated on top, and “The Silence” lets an over-driven master squash the punch out of its faster half. Across the louder tracks the familiar low-mid frequency stack creeps in, the bass losing definition under the fuzz, and the clean-and-shouted vocals occasionally sit a touch too dry and forward, perched on the mix rather than embedded in it.
None of that undoes what Black Smoke Rising is: an ambitious, varied, frequently excellent atmospheric stoner-doom record from a band willing to follow a heavy idea into acoustic, orchestral and shoegaze territory and make it cohere. The unevenness is the cost of that reach, not a failure of nerve. When Gjenferd lock in, as they do on “Bliss” and “Calling Your Name,” they are very good indeed, and an album this generous and this committed is worth the few tracks that miss.
Ambitious, varied atmospheric stoner-doom across eleven tracks, ranging from warm, earthy heaviness through shoegaze-tinted post-metal to two uncompressed acoustic and orchestral interludes (“Stillferd”, “Attergangar”). The strongest tracks (“Bliss”, “Calling Your Name”, “Spread Like Wildfire”) keep their dynamics genuinely intact, with analog warmth, real spatial depth and effective quiet-loud contrast. The unevenness is real: “Crimson Rain” and “The Silence” are pushed into a flattened, over-compressed wall-of-sound, the familiar low-mid frequency stacking creeps into the louder tracks and softens the bass, and the clean-and-shouted vocals sometimes sit too dry and forward. Generous, dynamic and committed, with a handful of tracks that miss.
Standout tracks: Bliss, Calling Your Name, Spread Like Wildfire
