Review by Adam M on June 21, 2016.

Sylvaine performs beautiful post-metal that is similar to Alcest in style. This music has many ebbs and flows of emotion much like Alcest’s material. The perfect comparison would be a combination of Alcest with what was heard on Myrkur’s first album.

The music has a beauty to it that is pure and all encompassing. It is stripped down and straight to the heart, but this is also what allows it to have such tremendous impact. The music here is ethereal and very pretty sounding. The entire approach is a thing of beauty. It does transcend into black metal a bit more and gain a bit of harshness at times, but is often in the pretty mode. This sense of mood is nicely demonstrated on the first track Delusions alone. The vocals alternate between the clean and harsh styles at the appropriate moment and effortlessly glide over the music. Still, despite the contrast, the majority of the music is dominated by the soft mood overall. It has the ability to glide right over the surroundings in the most serene of manners. Wistful is actually highly similar to the music of Myrkur, though this has more of the shoegaze element present. This element is interesting, but not necessarily used in the entirely appropriate manner at all times. There are lulls in the music and they could be related to the use of black metal portions and shoegaze elements as well.

Still, the ethereal atmosphere is captivating more often than not with the music here. It’s the ingredient that elevates this from a pretty good recording to a great one. One might wish there was slightly more consistency to be found, but there is very little to fault with this recording. It has the right mood for practically any moment.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Review by Jack on December 15, 2002.

I really don’t know quite where to begin with Rakoth. “Planeshift” is certainly a decent album with some good moments at times, but also it is a mediocre record with some, well, mediocre moments.

Largely playing folk black metal inspired by the works of author J.R.R. Tolkien, Rakoth go about forging their craft in some weird ways. Musically this record is pretty solid, but Rakoth just barely miss the mark with “Planeshift”. The vocalist is at times somewhat difficult to listen to. His black metal rasp is fine, but the clean vocals are strained and it becomes more or less a struggle for me to listen to his crooning throughout 50 odd minutes. The biggest problem for “Planeshift” lies in the fact that Rakoth are either too tepid or too bombastic with their material, never a happy medium. One section may be comprised of some beautiful keyboards and then it will radically jump to another section that keeps the keyboards intact whilst layering it with drums and hard guitar riffs; it destroys the mood the keyboards had working at the start.

While there are certainly some issues that need resolving here, Rakoth has a great musical concept happening and seem to be brimming with musical creativity and ideas. This is a fantastic thing and hopefully a refinement of “Planeshift” should see them only improve in the future.

Bottom Line: A bit of a fuzzy record. “Planeshift” suffers from some fantastic ideas not quite be correctly implemented. Rakoth has got some sound creativity working for them, they just need to find the correct musical equation to exploit it.

Categorical Rating Breakdown

Musicianship: 6
Atmosphere: 6.5
Production: 7
Originality: 7.5
Overall 5.5

Rating: 6.5 of 10