Review by Vladimir on February 7, 2023.

There are times when I come across something that caught my eye at first glance, be it the band name, the album cover, or even the album title. My morbid curiosity gets the best of me sometimes because I just can’t help myself but see if I am walking into a “death trap” or not. To put it simply, the urge to fight back is just futile. Case and point are the polish one man project Titan Mountain, led by an individual named Nazgrim, with the genre switching between symphonic black metal and progressive symphonic metal. I’ll be dealing with the subject’s tenth album Monumental Furious Shadow Metal from 2019, and dissect its material. Before I say something about the album itself, I’ll just say that the band name Titan Mountain sounds rather unusual and weird when I just think about it, but I don’t want to judge the book by its cover yet, we’ll get to that later.

The album consist of five instrumental tracks, first one being a 3-minute symphonic ambient intro that in my opinion builds up the expectation nicely, making you believe that this might be worth your while. After the intro, the second track 'Pod Bramą Królestwa Mrozu' kicks things off with symphonic metal consisting of progressive riff arrangements and medieval atmospheric keyboards. The third track 'Krzyki Cieni' is where we’re greeted with some symphonic black metal with tremolo riffing, double bass drumming and keyboards which totally shifts the mood that the previous track established by 180 degrees. The fourth track 'Kiedy Wyobraźnia Rodzi Misterną Ornamentykę' might be the real shine of this album, due to it being the only long ambient track which sounds as if it came from a level in an RPG game. So far, you’d think that I enjoyed this experience, right? Well, unfortunately I can’t say for sure that I did. The music itself sounds good and all, but the arrangements, keyboard melodies, guitar solos and riffs feel just all over the place and totally unrelated when all pieces are put together, at times being very random and not living up to the expected climax. The second and the fifth bonus track are progressive symphonic metal while the third track is symphonic black metal, which totally doesn’t fit together and feels like there was absolutely no musical direction, which I would describe as a case of various ideas being thrown at the board. I can tell that there was some genuine effort put into this work but not enough care to see it all come together in a fine set so to speak. What makes this experience feel empty is the lack of vocals, which would have eased it all by just a bit, be it clean or harsh singing. Another thing I want to talk about, which I mentioned earlier, was the album cover and the album title. The cover is just a picture of a forest road with trees next to it that was probably taken during a long walk in the forest and gave Nazgrim an idea that it would be cool to use it as an album cover and decided to go with it. Not only does it not fit with the music and the album title which says Monumental Furious Shadow Metal, but it totally undermines the quality even more. Even the album title feels like complete nonsense, like the music itself it’s totally unrelated and I don’t even know what it is supposed to mean. Monumental Furious Shadow Metal? Oh boy that’s a mouthful. As for the sound production, surprisingly it’s actually quite solid, it doesn’t feel like an amateur attempt at home production, but the drum sound is a bit artificial with the kicks sounding too thin and clean.

This project and this album feel like a total mishmash of ideas which weren’t well thought-out, it totally gives you an impression that it was rushed before being properly “baked in the oven”. I can’t say much about Nazgrim’s music skills other than the fact that they are good and far from terrible, but his songwriting skills do need a lot to work on because it’s really missing many points to hit it right.

Rating: 5.2 out of 10