Celestia "Apparitia: Sumptuous Spectre" (Paragon)
By Cameron Higby-Naquin
Monday. Mar 12, 12:02 AM
Seeks to bridge the boundary between black and doom.

To me, droning has a lot of appeal. Of course, not in the sense of uninteresting, rambling lectures, but a sustained monotone. A metal drone is resonant power, vibrating and undulating around a single, overdriven blast of sound. Often a drone is allowed to run out its power and expire, though sometimes it is consumed by a second droning chord. Celestia, a band that seeks to bridge the boundary between black and doom, find that drones can join the disparate sounds.

On Apparitia: Sumptuous Spectre, the primary sound of the guitars is a fuzzy drone. This noise dominates everything else, from the pounding drums in the background with the dully throbbing bass to the rasping vocals closer to the foreground. But everything is immersed in the droning guitars. The effect does not really vary between songs. On each track, the singer rasps his same rasp, the drums beat their same beat, and the droning fuzz works its way from riff to buzzing riff.

Listening to these songs, which all blend together in my mind, I'm conflicted. I like the droning sounds, but I wish Celestia could put their trademark effect to better use. It is clear that they have some tricks up their sleeve. On "Spectra," a harsh lead guitar wails in through the waves and waves of fuzz and drone and the dichotomoy between monotone and wildly fluctuating notes is effective. And on "Morbid Romance," the strongest track on the album, the middle of the song is dominated by a very doomy, melancholic dirge with exactly the right amount of keyboard accompaniment flitting between ponderous columns of deep drones. It's a shame the vocalist did not choose to alter his raspy intonation a bit more for this part, but the part took my breath away nonetheless.

Celestia has a great deal of potential with their style. There are strivings, subtle yet present, toward greatness but some overwhelming force, perhaps the sheer weight of so many droning buzzsaws, hinders them from exploring those subconscious urges.
www.paragonrecords.net

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Cameron Higby-Naquin

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