Harakiri for the Sky – III: Trauma (Review)

As the name suggests, this is the third album from this Austrian post-black metal band.

Harakiri for the Sky blend resplendent, expansive post-rock/metal with a blackened intensity. The resulting 75 minutes of music on III: Trauma is heavily atmospheric, with a darkened core that screams out in forlorn misery and pain.

There’s an element of the depressive black metal style on this album, but whereas all too frequently that can become too limiting or one-dimensional in a band, Harakiri for the Sky bring more than just this to the table. The band inject their playing with the aforementioned post-rock/metal elements, which allow different aspects to their music to shine darkly, bringing out the misery with the effective layering of mourning and grief. Deafheaven meets Ghost Bath, with added post-rock? Maybe.

The singer’s scathing screams sit top a bed of soaring melodies and distorted emotion, providing a biting riposte to the giddy emotive excesses of the music.

The music boasts a powerful production that allows everything to gleam in solidity and strength, without diminishing the music’s fragility or subtlety one notch.

The depressive themes continue throughout, with little hope making it into the music, despite some of the brighter guitar melodies that surface here and there. Everyone knows it will all end in blood and madness anyway, so why bother wishing for it to be anything different? Harakiri for the Sky embrace this knowledge, channelling and focusing it into this lengthy exploration of loss and despondency.

If you like your black metal with an exploratory edge and seeped in woe, then this is for you.