Metal Can Look Good | Thulcandra - Spirit Of The Night

This is it friends, the double whammy.  Today is a very special marriage of two of my favorite segments on the site, Metal Can Look Good Too and Shiny Pennies.  Metal Can Look Shiny.  

Thulcandra is the name of the band and as I implied before, they are both sonically and visually stunning.  I'll start with the album cover.  Kristian Wahlin, aka Necrolord, has never disappointed me.  The artistic duties that he preformed for Thulcandra are no exception.  The cover for Fallen Angels Dominion harkens back to some of his early work for the likes of Bathory, Emperor and Dissection.  The cold landscape and grim flautist perfectly complement the melodic and ice cold sonic spheres that await the listener within, bringing me to my next point...

Much like the art on the outside, the art within will almost immediately remind the listener of the late, great Dissection.  Upon further inspection, your initial suspicion of that will be solidified into fact.  I suspect Dissection is after all Thulcandra's main source of inspiration along with some Unanimated for good measure.  Don't go looking into this album for something profoundly original because you will be sold short.  This is Dissection worship. Dissection worship at its finest.  And given the huge void that the band left in melodic black metal with the death of Jon Nödtveidt, it was warmly welcomed into my library.  All that being said, I don't want to give you the idea that this band completely lacks original thought.  There are within this album, musical epiphanies that go beyond Dissection's formula yet still seem to continue their vision.  Whatever your take may be, I think it is easy to agree that Thulcandra breathed life into a genre many feared dead, all the while hacking their own paths through densely wooded sonic forests to divulge upon an old familiar walkway long abandoned.