Album Review: Mountainscape – Iridescent (Celestial Diadem Records)

Mountainscape, the 3-piece instrumental post-metal band from the UK, released their new, and third, album ‘Iridescent’ on June 7th, 2024, via Celestial Diadem Records.

Draw the blinds, Sit back, put a pair of headphones on, close your eyes, and press play on Mountainscape’s new album, Iridescent. An album that demands focus, but an album that pays off your investment with an incredible array of immersive sounds. Not just delivering a beautiful and heart-wrenching post metal soundscape but delivering something acutely cinematic.

Whether you want to or not, you will feel something across the five tracks of this release, but be under no false illusions, Mountainscape are a heavy band too. Offering up some seriously monolithic riffs and pounding percussion that takes the music in darker directions. Sometimes sounding black, sometimes sounding doomy, sometimes sounding sludgy, and always sounding immense.

It might only be five tracks long, but each is a towering titan of post metal with the shortest track coming in at around six and a half minutes long, and the longest track nearly hitting the eleven-minute mark. Not that it matters, because no track feels too short or too long, in fact, because of the flow, it’s easy to get lost in Iridescent and not notice the runtime in the slightest. Which is always the sign of a stellar release.

No one track is better than the other, it’s more about the moments in each. From emphatic melodic drifts and soaring cinematic ambience, to dreamy lulls and starry highs, to crushing heaviness and robust meatiness. The entirety of Iridescent is excitingly creative and Mountainscape do a phenomenal job of holding the attention right to the very end.

There have already been some impressive instrumental post rock and metal releases this year, but Mountainscape’s new album can be spoken about in the same way as those ‘record of the year’ contenders. It is that good, that enthralling, and that immersive. Even as it ends, and reality comes flooding back in, it remains at the forefront of the mind.

Mountainscape – Iridescent Track Listing:

1. Belonging
2. Towering Monoliths
3. Astrium
4. Ignis
5. Iridescent

Links

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