"I'm rather challenged by this one - on the one hand, this is some top tier melodic black black metal - great use oriental progression and enough diversity to theoretically keep me interested in the album. But, and this plagued the music industry from like 1996 until 2016, the production here is horrendous! I really want to like this one and give it a great score. Unfortunately, however, whoever the hell mastered this one needs to have turned down... everything! It's engineered way too loudly, there's no breathing room nor dynamism, and I can't sit through the whole thing before feeling fatigued. This issue is not unique to this album; again it was an industry-wide issue for 20 years; it's just unfortunate that this album was horribly dragged down by it. Oh well... maybe next time. I'm considering lowering this to a 4 simply because the mastering is so bad; however, if the mastering were not garbage, I'd have given it probably a 7 (yet for albums released in 2010, this one os actually one of the BETTER mastered albums in the metal realm. Good riddance to the loudness war. May it NEVER come back.)"
