Australia's Earthshine are another brilliant newcomer to the realm that can be roughly circumscribed as Atmospheric Black Metal, a subgenre that has existed since the 90s and seen tremendous growth in the last few years. As a matter of fact, Earthshine's music has that distinctive mid-90s vibe to it, as if the album was recorded 20 years ago and has remained a well-kept secret until now. In fact, when we first heard it, it reminded us of Tumulus' great "Hymns and Dirges" demo from 1994 as well as some Death/Doom classics from that era. Thankfully, the album is of newer vintage (recorded during 2014/15) and the band is already working on the next one. Earthshine, while taking influences from leading Black Metal acts such as Summoning or Bathory, also incorporate plenty of Doom Metal traits into their music, such as the excellent Death/Doom vocals or the mostly slow and heavy song structures, topped off by great guitar leads and the occasional clean vocal choirs. Warning (UK), 40 Watt Sun, Candlemass, Ahab, Alcest, Slowdive, Nothing and Mono are other notable influences. Overall, this is one of our favourite releases of 2016 so far and likely to end up in our personal top ten. The first pressing of the CD comes as collectors edition in Digipack, limited to 1000 copies
