Who knows if it isn’t the most ethereal piece of the disc, in a sense referring to the mood of “The Ocean Calls Us Home” while pointing to Canadian post-rock inclinations, wallowing in serene solitude. The songs are quite long: “Ostara” lasts more than ten minutes. Water will consume us and the ocean will, in fact, become our home. Later the riffs are starting to thicken, crunching like storm clouds looming from behind the horizon. While “Transcendence”, the album opener, is a trance-like drone, in this track we have guitar melodies roaming slowly, truly reminiscent of the vastness of the ocean seen from a crow’s nest on some shell that someone dared to call a ship. “The Ocean Calls Us Home”, the second song on the album, just couldn’t have been more adequately titled.
Not only because of the cover or such and no other song titles (“The Ocean Calls Us Home”, “The Silver Forest”), since if they couldn’t cope with the material that reaches our auditory organs, the most perfect front cover wouldn’t help. They are aware that it’s quite a difficult task due to the limited instrumentation, but somehow they manage to do it. Jim and Dorian try to add an organic flavor to their music. It’s clearly noticeable however, that these two fellows are attracted by ethereal space rather than monolithic riffs, hence Northumbria is closer to Thisquietarmy than say, Sunn O))). “Bring Down the Sky” is built of guitar drones standing halfway between doom and ambient. The thing is very much in the style of Consouling Sounds, a label that specializes in metal, but never the conventional kind infected with ambient, post-rock or shoegaze in such a way that those styles often begin to dominate the metal matter.
“Bring Down the Sky” is their second full-length release, which – apart from the use of electric guitars – doesn’t have much in common with Viking metal. Northumbria is also a musical project by Dorian Williamson and Jim Field. These include, among others, the island of Lindisfarne, with the abbey plundered by the Vikings in 793 AD. Northumbria was a medieval kingdom, the lands of which now belong to the UK.
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