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MOONFALL
Odes To The Ritual Hills

Iron Bonehead Productions (2025)
Rating: 6.5/10

Being the creation of Goatprayer (Ceremonial Torture / Archdemon / Darkera etc.) and Black Moon Necromancer (Beherit / Darkera / Funerealm Gloom etc.), Moonfall is a grim sounding black-doom act that wallows within the deepest recesses of the Finnish underground.

If you like creepy, atmospheric oddness then it’s worth checking yourself into this keyboard-laden well of misery, a place which flutters with haunting whispers, weird fuzzy instrumentation and a general lo-fi vibe. After a short intro (‘1560’) Moonfall slips into the scuzzy nocturnal delights of ‘Countess Carody’, a simple yet primitive and all too lengthy track that wafts of that primordial black metal ethos but without the scurrying and raw dissonance. Instead, you get an unwavering plod that’s basement level at best. Admittedly the production is poor and so the instruments tend to suffer greatly, although I’m sure that this is probably intentional?

The title cut is similarly paced, drenched in atmosphere and slithering with that primitive fuzz as the ethereal slurs and snarls echo through the damp keep. As the track unfolds, Moonfall throws in a few differing plods, all jabbed by the keyboards and an air of stark raving madness. The charm here though is the amateurish nature of it all. In fact, this is the sort of thing me and my mates would have put together back in 1994 as teenagers. However, my biggest frustration with this offering is the fact you only get two actual songs and they are sandwiched in-between an intro and outro (‘Thus Spoke Satanael’), but then again, because of the at times one dimensional nature of the album, any sort of deviation from the plodding scuzz is a welcome.

Odes To The Ritual Hills is a strange little release, but it does sit nicely alongside last year’s Funerealm Gloom album, Catachthonium Mysteriis, that I’m still spooked by.

Neil Arnold

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