Ieschure - When The Darkness Comes
Lilita Arndt is the musician behind Ieschure. It has been seven long years since the promising debut, The Shadow. In between saw Ieschure release singles, EPs and Splits, and Lilita also has two other projects: Akhernar being a hypnotic, emotionally draining drone based project. Then there is LoneTower, which is a noise, synth driven project that released Solar Eclipse. What all three projects have in common is darkness, and in 2024, Ieschure release When The Darkness Comes.
When the Darkness Comes is nine tracks over 38 minutes. Much like The Shadow, When the Darkness Comes includes an intro and an outro, and the lyrical themes are similar across both releases. Ieschure dances with death, there are occult themes, shadows and darkness are aplenty, and there are no shortages of dead bodies, illusions, voices and sacrifices.
The intro, “Wandering in the Desert of Illusions” has a deliberate nervousness about it. There is a layer of rawness behind the middle eastern acoustics, melody and heartbeat. It is a really interesting Morricone type opening that sets the tone for what is ahead.
Ieschure has Black Metal at its soul, but When The Darkness Comes has a palette that is a little broader than that. There are middle eastern melodies, tones and colours across the album, and it reaches the edges of post rock with some of the tremolo expansions, but everything is always bathed in a very dark and emotional undertone. I think Lilita would approve of this album being played on a cold winter night, sitting on a porch, clouds disfiguring the moon, candlelight adorning a coffee table littered with books about witchcraft and other occult paraphernalia.
Lilita’s vocals are the highlight on an album that has a lot of magic. Lilita can sound like Julie Christmas one second, and Chelsea Wolfe shortly after, and in juxtaposition, her Black Metal vocals are so vicious, raw and emotional that you hope they were done in one take. The light/dark vocals in unison are used sparingly and to great effect. That is the sign of a clever songwriter. In “The Path of Master,” Lilita’s heavier vocals are similar to Lingua Ignota at her most deranged, and that is a very good thing.
There is a distinct Burzum quality here. Repetition is one of the tools used, but I like to call it consistency and emotion. Ieschure play with conviction, with meaning, with soul. Things get horrific, but it can be beautiful at the same time, and it is that balance that makes this a mesmerising and brilliant album. Hypnotic and catchy, within darkness must come light.
Musically, it is not overcomplicated but everything is effective and every second is used well. The album has been mastered very well. The album is loud, compression is not a tool used here, and what it does is give it an unhinged feel, even though these tracks have been arranged carefully. The flow and overall experience of the album is seamless and the ebbs and flows, valleys and peaks and the balance within and between songs has been thoughtfully curated. At some point around “Into the Black Mountains,” there is a chance that a numbness washes over you. You become resigned to the album’s energy, its cadence and the intriguing backdrop to where this must have been written (Ukraine).
The frozen souls of wild storms
No home to live
No place to hide
Eternal cold
The silence in me.
The darkness in me.
It is not a perfect album. In contrast to the intro, the outro is cleaner, longer, has vocals and does not add any darkness or light to the experience. It may have been better placed as a shorter interlude. While there are subtle shifts and dynamics within the tracks, as an overall experience, some listeners that do not engage with the emotion and energy, or despise the monotony of Burzum’s Filosofem may reach a point here where the formula reaches the ‘all too familiar’ by the half way point.
The Shadow was a good album that built the foundations of Ieschure. The singles, EPs and Splits in between is the frame, and while I do not think Lilita has built the whole home yet, When the Darkness Comes is a huge step up in quality, from songwriting to performances, but, more importantly, the emotion that Lilita conveys here is profound. How the whole piece of art is delivered is special - conviction and authenticity is bleeding from this.
Into the Rolling Top Ten of 2024. #5.