The Flight of Sleipnir Stream V. in Full
However European (much of) their influential base might be, The Flight of Sleipnir‘s will to bend genre and combine different sounds marks them out as a distinctly American band. The two-piece of David Csicsely (drums, vocals, guitar) and Clayton Cushman (vocals, guitar, bass, keys) hail from a town called Arvada, Colorado, less than 10 miles outside the capitol of Denver, but nestled enough into the sharp-tipped Rocky Mountains that their cascading, blackened fuzz could feasibly be born of its landscape. The duo have maintained an exploratory feel throughout their time together, and their fifth and latest outing, V., continues that run. Their first for Napalm Records after two full-lengths — 2013’s Saga and 2011’s Essence of Nine (review here) — on Eyes Like Snow, it’s as mature and steady in its composition as one might expect, but maintains a fierce creative drive as well, its seven tracks/59 minutes pushing forward in aesthetic and atmosphere.
With their commitment to psychedelia and black metal, it’s tempting to think of The Flight of Sleipnir as the stylistic movement that should’ve happened and never did with Nachtmystium, but the truth is Csicsely and Cushman traffic in more complex fare. Extended cuts like “Sidereal Course” and “Gullveig” have their blackened aspects — I’d still call The Flight of Sleipnir a black metal band before anything else — but 
their forays into psychedelia also bring an awareness of doom, of heavy rock tendencies toward repetition, and give a post-metal feel to some of the shifts between ambient and dense sections. In addition, the balance struck between screams and clean singing from one track to the next, as on opener “Headwinds” and “Sidereal Course,” only furthers the complexity of V., since where a lot of modern metal has fallen into the formula of screamy verse/clean chorus, The Flight of Sleipnir seem more interested in what best suits the mood of the song at that time. To call the record immersive would be underselling it. The forest-style screams of “The Casting” and the lumbering, doom-laden centerpiece “Nothing Stands Obscured” arrive fairly deep in the mix, and the overarching theme throughout is a three-dimensional tonality in the guitar and bass that, in headphones, takes the rawness of lo-fi black metal and gives it a surprisingly rich incarnation, so that the march at the end of “Nothing Stands Obscured” is as lush as it is searing.
This multifaceted, impeccably layered approach comes to a head with “Gullveig,” on which a light wah lead tops some foreboding underpinnings and becomes a theme played off of for full-toned riffs and screams, paced perfectly for V.‘s most satisfying nod. Cushman and Csicsely build up past the halfway point and then work in acoustics to begin an instrumental exploration that will consume the rest of the runtime, clean singing and screams interweaving for an apex effect that leads fluidly into the closing duo of “Archaic Rites” (9:07) and “Beacon in Black Horizon” (11:26), both of which continue to further the album’s atmospheric impact, the former through shifting the form of “Gullveig” to an even more serene, natural spirit, and the latter stripping back down early to blacksludge roll-riffing before escaping into trippy effects and never seeming to settle as compounds payoff with payoff to cap V. with an appropriately noisy stomp, the undercurrent of low end carrying them smoothly through quick-breath breaks and fuller onslaught to the drone, chanting and long silence that follows the closer’s finish, their sonic adventurousness never having relented once along the way.
V. came out earlier this week through Napalm Records and today I have the pleasure of streaming the album in its entirety. Please check it out on the player below, and enjoy:
The Flight of Sleipnir on Thee Facebooks
The Flight of Sleipnir on Bandcamp
The Flight of Sleipnir at Napalm Records
Tags: Arvada, Colorado, Napalm Records, The Flight of Sleipnir, The Flight of Sleipnir V, V
