Album Review : Vetus Supulcrum - Windswept Canyons of Thule (2020)
Listen to Windswept Canyons of Thule here
Don’t let the music industry fool you: it is awesome that it’s falling apart. Today, you can listen to whatever you really like and not what coked out music executives have pre-selected for you and threatened your local radio DJ into playing. What you really like might sometimes be… music that makes you remember playing Baldur’s Gate 2 in your dorm room at 3h00 AM when you were nineteen. In order words, shit you’re not likely to find on FM airwaves.
It is the exact thrill Maurice De Jong’s dungeon synth project Vetus Supulcrum’s upcoming album Windswept Canyons of Thule provided me. Not something I could’ve had twenty years ago. Not without having to browse shady FTP servers for way too fucking long.
Broadly speaking, dungeon synth is a musical subgenre that features grown-ass men trying to make you feel like you’re watching the Lord of the Rings movies with their keyboard. There is a lot more to Vetus Supulcrum and Windswept Canyons of Thule. It’s a rich, layered experience guided by a clear thought process. It is not a project concerned with any boundaries. Only thing that matters are the powerfulmental images the songs are supposed to evoke.
Take Hunted By The Wolves of the Night. It is one of my favorite songs on the record. Not only Maurice De Jong added tortured, dissonant wolves howls to heighten the read, but what makes the song slap so hard is the intense percussions that render the experience of being chased through uneven terrain. Beneath the Dark Storm is another good example. It has two competing synth lines: one bright and majestic, the other brooding and chaotic.
That songs feels like being awed by something too great and powerful for you, which I believe is the desired effect.
I know what you’re thinking: how can a lone synth and digital trickery can render such a cinematic experience. Truth is it doesn’t. Dungeon synth is supposed to feel a little artificial by nature, like a video game soundtrack. March of the Black Legion and Call of the Nazgul illustrate that fascinating aspect of the genre by having synths capturing and mimicking the grandiosity of military music. It sounds like brass instruments from your worst nightmares.
A Strange Light From Beneath is another great song from Windswept Canyons of Thule and perhaps its most daring. It is the most structureless on the record and the addition of weird electronic voices enhance its dreamlike atmosphere. It also has the only song title that doesn’t tell you exactly what it is supposed to evoke. It is up to the listener to construct the experience, which is a challenge I appreciated coming from dungeon synth, a nonexperimental genre by nature.
Maurice De Jong embodies everything that is good about the collapse of the music industry. Here’s a super creative guy who writes, record and releases music like an inspired madman every year and there is no idiot with a marketing degree in his way to tell him there’s no market for it or whatever. Although his music is the definition of niche, but is has found us: the people who spend too much time on the internet looking for stuff that challenges normality.
Windswept Canyons of Thule is a great record. One of the best dungeon synth releases I’ve ever heard. It’s good enough to initiate your normie friends to the genre and not having them look at you weird after. Not sure exactly when the official release is. I’ve seen October 17 on Maurice’s Facebook page. October 23 on promo material. The album seems already available for streaming on Bandcamp. Either way, give it a spin and turn back time. It’s awesome.
8.0/10
