It’s tough to find something new to say about a project that you’ve talked about on numerous occasions, and when that critique is always positive, it becomes harder to say something that will mean anything to anyone other than yourself or the band in question. It becomes something that everyone reading has read before, and will read again, yet sometimes the music and the heart is so true, that it doesn’t matter. That you love it so much and feel it so keenly that you need to spill the words on the electronic page in order to feel complete. Often records come along that need to be spoken about, that need to be felt, that must be heard and while this introduction is more a way of justifying reviewing Panopticon yet again, it’s also a way of putting my own thoughts together.

Where previous records have gone from being hugely crust/black metal (Panopticon) influenced to political (Social Disservices) to more folky and historical (Kentucky), Autumn Eternal holds back on the traditional elements and instead wraps subdued moments into layers of harsher, bleak tones. The Panopticon that we’ve come to know on later releases is mostly evident on opener “Tamarack’s Gold Returns” – a sweet nod to the turning of the colour of the leaves of the Tamarack tree – with the use of Johan Becker’s gorgeous strings adding depth and emotion to the instrumental opening.

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