EP Review: The Eternal - Celestial
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Formed in Melbourne, Australia by guitarist / vocalist, Mark Kelson after the dissolution of his previous band, Cryptal Darkness, The Eternal wasted no time in issuing a demo and their full-length debt album, The Sombre Light of Isolation, by 2004.
By the release of their seventh studio album, 2024’s Skinwalker, Mark had been joined by Dreadnaught and Nefariym guitarist and keyboard player, Richie Poate, and a Finnish contingent of Niclas Etelävuori on bass and drummer, Jan Rechberger who had spent twelve years providing the bottom end for Amorphis between their Am Universum and Circle albums.
Continuing the fusion of melancholic atmospherics, doom-laden weight and a progressive spirit heard on Skinwalker, Celestial delves deeper in to the emotional journey. Previously released as a single Everlasting MMXXVI is the EP’s most commercial sounding moment, using driving beats and unstoppable rhythms, though not able to mask the fatalistic world view heard elsewhere on the record.
The Eternal is fully adept when writing in the trimmer, sub-five-minute format: It All Ends carries a more direct fatalism, hidden within a synth opening and delicate keys. There is a moment when you get Depeche Mode vibes, the soaring Gothicism of a Swallow the Sun is underlined with the choral mantra of the title being chanted into perpetuity. Bleeding Into Light plays with ideas of opposites: light and shade, ephemeral guitar lines and brooding melancholy come together through mournful soloing and atmospheric keys.
Perhaps more suited to lengthier compositions, the EP format sees the band breaking the six-minute ceiling only twice. Firstly, on the Gothically tinged Celestial Veil, which evokes Katatonia’s Discouraged Ones era, as sharp guitars joust with the guttural low end; at the halfway point, those guitars turn savage for a time, returning later to a hypnotic and mesmeric state. It’s not the fearsome doom death of My Dying Bride, rather the windswept romanticism of a Bronte novel.
Celestial is at its most savage and unruly on Casting Down Shadows, which finds Niclas’ throbbing bass coming to the fore in this middle eastern spiced banquet of a track. Passages swell, vocals build, additional instrumentation contribute further to the otherworldly aspects, right down to the sound of a snake charmer’s pipes. Epic in every sense of the word, there’s even a Zeppelin-esque mysticism to be heard as the tune comes to its end.
Clocking in at around half-an-hour, Celestial is the work of a band unafraid to give themselves over to the bleak darkness they see in the world, yet who never forget there is a stark beauty awaiting anyone with the perseverance to seek it out.
