Album Review: Fen – Elemental Part One: Mourning Earth

 

For the uninitiated, Fen have spent the better part of twenty years turning a very specific patch of England into a sound. Named after the Fens – the flat, mist-bound wetlands of eastern England where the band’s roots lie – they emerged in 2006 as standard-bearers of British atmospheric black metal, fusing the cold fury of the genre with the widescreen melancholy of post-rock and the shimmer of what would later be badged blackgaze. Comparisons to Agalloch dogged them early; they even toured with the Americans. But Fen long ago earned the right to be measured on their own terms, and across records like Carrion Skies and Winter they built a body of work as bleak and beautiful as the landscape that inspired it.

Their last outing, 2023’s Monuments to Absence, was the sound of a band pressing hard on the accelerator – dense, fast, unrelenting. Mourning Earth deliberately eases off. This is Fen returning to first principles, giving their songs room to breathe, and letting ideas unfurl at the pace of weather rather than adrenaline. Large stretches were tracked live, and you can hear it: an organic looseness, three musicians in a room chasing a feeling rather than gridding it to a click. The concept, fittingly, is elemental – earth, transience, the slow grief of a landscape mourning itself – and the six tracks are named less like songs than like features on an Ordnance Survey map of somewhere very cold.

Glacier opens the record the way an ice sheet moves – with enormous, patient force. Clean, questing guitar lines ride high over a fast, insistent pulse before the whole thing opens out into a swell of massed, near-choral voices; by the closing stretch the track has hardened into something genuinely crushing, a heaviness that feels geological rather than merely loud. It is a mission statement in miniature: a band comfortable letting a song take its time to arrive, confident you will follow it there. If you have ever wondered what Enslaved might sound like scoring a documentary on the last winter on Earth, start here.

Tectonic keeps the ground moving. Where the opener glided, this one rumbles – a lower-slung, more muscular piece that leans into Fen’s heavier instincts without abandoning the atmosphere. There is real weight to the riffing, the kind that suggests plates shifting somewhere far beneath the surface, and The Watcher’s vocal – a parched, scouring rasp – cuts through the murk with genuine menace. It is the sound of the record flexing before it drifts, and it earns the calm that follows.

Massif is where Mourning Earth first shows its softer face. The riffs give way to something weightless and half-lit, layered voices lifting into an almost hymnal glow, and the track floats off towards the blackgaze frontier Fen have always patrolled – you will think of Alcest, all forlorn beauty and skyward reach. It is proof that the “return to roots” is not code for a retreat into aggression; the roots they are reaching for are as much about delicacy as they are about fury.

Abyssal Plain takes that drift to its logical depth. The most patient thing here, it is content to hover in the dark for long stretches, mapping the vast, lightless flatness its title evokes. Not everyone will have the patience for it, and it lacks the immediate hooks of the tracks around it – this is the album’s most demanding passage, deep water that asks you to submit rather than meeting you halfway. But held at the right volume, in the right gloom, it works its slow spell.

Barrow jolts the record back to life and is one of its most immediately arresting moments. It swaggers in on a hook with an unexpected bite to it, a flash of something Fen don’t often reach for, before settling into the older business of raising ghosts. The title is apt: a barrow is an ancient burial mound, and this is Fen at their most haunted – the buried dead seeming to murmur up through the peat, the land refusing to let them lie. It is the sound of a place that cannot forget.

Moor closes Part One as any good opening chapter should – not with a full stop but with a horizon. It gathers itself slowly, light accumulating in glittering layers, until the haze breaks and a melody carries the whole record skyward one last time. There is catharsis here, a real sense of release after all that grey, but the door is deliberately left ajar. This is a band closing a movement, not a book, and it sends you out into the mist already wondering what waits on the far side.

What holds all of this together is the sheer coherence of the thing. Fen have always been album artists rather than singles merchants, and Mourning Earth rewards the sit-down, one-take listen the way their best work always has – the six tracks flow into one another like water finding its level.

As Part One of a two-part work, Mourning Earth carries an unavoidable provisionality – it is a first act, and first acts are judged partly on the promise of what follows. Taken on its own, though, it stands more than tall enough: arguably the most complete distillation of what Fen do that they’ve yet committed to tape, balancing the cold bite of their black metal against their post-black wanderlust with the assurance of a band twenty years into knowing exactly who they are. Whether Part Two builds on it or subverts it, the opening statement is a triumph of mood, patience, and place

8/10