Band: A Forest Of Stars
Title: Opportunistic Thieves Of Spring
Label: Lupus Lounge
Distribution: Prophecy Productions
Release date: May 2011
Review: CD

[(excerpt from the bio) The year is 1891. The members of the Gentlemen’s Club of A Forest Of Stars, an exclusive brotherhood of English Victorians, consider themselves to be exponents of their glorious and pompous, at times decadent era characterized by extreme opposites. A Forest Of Stars channel the experiences gained from their numerous meetings hazed by opium and absinthe, occult rites and séances in the form of previously unheard-of ghostly and hypnotic music, filled with the spirit of the glorious Victorian Age – a harrowing testimony of their many spiritual and sensual excesses.]
Interpretation: Post-Black with a Prophecy-undertone…

Opportunistic Thieves Of Spring (an inventive title indeed!) is the second A Forest Of Stars-album, already released last year in North America through Transcendental Records. I don’t know why it got delayed, the European release, but finally it’s a fact. Six songs, seventy minutes; as you can imagine, this album is a creation of the Darkest Order.
The first notes of the opening song, Sorrow’s Impetus, are strongly Funeral Doom-influenced, yet soon this song transforms into moments of Post-Rock, Post-Black, Pagan-Folk, Suicidal Black, Nordic Black, Doom-Death, Prog / Alternative / Experimental, Psychedelica, and ancient-traditional or ethnic-traditional (from Oriental over gipsy-ish to…). Bizarre yet mostly creative. Dissonant and / or melodic and / or rhythmic and / or technical guitar lines, pounding drum patterns, heavy bass riffs and ritual screams are the main ingredients, yet atmospheric and / or haunting synths and hypnotic flutes, ethnic and other kinds of percussion, sitar and acoustic guitars, (Grand) piano and violin, sounds and samples, it’s all part of the deal.
The compositions are -or did you expect something else?- very varying in every aspect and what’s of huge importance is the balancing-on-the-edge, the dangerous interaction with an over-the-top mentality. This unconventional stuff is artistic experimentum, yet not that ridiculously exaggerated at all, but most intelligently thought-through. This band goes way beyond the average, beyond normality, beyond prediction, beyond conservation and narrow-minded tradition, beyond Space and Time…

The CD-version comes with a bonus-DVD, including a video clip of Raven’s Eye View and a live performance of Male, by the way.

91/100

Ivan Tibos.