Elderwind – Древнее древних – Album Review
18th April 2025Древнее древних (Older than Ancient) is not a collection of songs. It is a rite performed in the absence. A cold-blooded invocation scratched into the bark of dead trees. Elderwind does not compose—they exhume. They kneel in frozen soil and pull from it something breathing, covered in moss, and asleep.
Guitars waver like heat mirages inside a blizzard—long, trembling filaments caught between sky and tundra. They do not arrive. They appear, as if summoned, hanging mid-air like ritual smoke. Beneath them, the drums move like slow hooves through packed snow: a processional rhythm, echoing deep in the bones of the forest. Nothing urgent. Nothing alive in the usual sense. Just the slow turning of antlers in fog.
The voice is distant, cloaked. Not human. Not entirely. A shape behind a veil. It speaks in vowels stretched thin, in the vowels of animals buried upright in permafrost. The syllables are swallowed before they can form, as if the mouth chanting them no longer remembers how to be warm.
This album has no spine. It coils. It drips. It rearranges the air around it.
Themes do not develop—they moult. A melody arrives, cloaked in ice, and returns three tracks later wearing the skin of something hunted. There is no climax, only deeper levels of stillness. You go further down not to reach something but to forget you were looking.
Elderwind builds with patience lost to most of us. Each moment feels etched into stone using something sharp and holy. You are not guided—you are left in the middle of a vast clearing as the fog rises and the trees recede. The cold begins to hum. The stars begin to move in unfamiliar patterns.
And yet nothing breaks. Nothing burns. This is not music for catharsis. It is the sound of becoming hollow enough to carry snow without melting it.
“Древнее древних” is not meant to be heard. It is meant to be entered. A ritual for standing still so long the wind forgets your name and begins to speak through your ribs instead.
Score 7/10
Tracks
01. Intro
02. Prospectors
03. Sorrow for the Past
04. The Greatness of the Ancient
05. Wayfarers of the Wind
06. Blood of the Sunset
07. The Volga
Label – Independent
Release – 12th April 2025
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