Tyhjyys "Tyhjyys" CD

While looking for something else on Youtube.com (as you do), I ran across this secretive Finnish atmospheric black metal act's one and only (so far) album release. There's naught to be found anywhere on Google about this band - no information about how many members it has and who they are - so I guess Tyhjyys prefer to stay anonymous and just keep on releasing music when and where it sees fit. The beauty is that the band's reputation lives and dies by its music alone, and what I have heard of the self-titled album suggests that reputation may be a long-lived one if nurtured carefully.
Though the album is divided into seven untitled tracks, it's best heard as one over-arching work: every track is instrumental with any vocals limited to distant roars, cries and howls of pain and desperation. My impression is that the drumming sounds natural enough and so I hazard that a live drummer at least is sitting in: whether that person is a key member of the band or otherwise is something else again. All the way through the music is fast and urgent with barely any pause for breath or slowdown in the music. Everything whooshes by and any stop in the action is only for the change from one track to the next. There's a lot of energy in the music, much feeling, anger and despair, the last reinforced by screams of the damned in the far background. There is an air of bleakness, a lack of hope and no promise that anything will change.
While individual tracks are quite good, strung out together on the one album, even if it is a digestible 39-minute runner, they can unfortunately become a monotonous listening experience, with a big part of the problem being that there is not much variation in the pace or in the instruments used - each and every track features blistering raw BM guitar battery, active percussion and a deep raw grinding bass, but little else besides that is particular to each track. There are not even any lead guitar solos and it's out of the question with music like this to ask for the odd acoustic-guitar melody soliloquy or two. Some excellent riffs abound especially in later parts of the album and these repay repeated hearings. The Tyhjyys members pay no attention to cultivating distinct atmospheres on some tracks, never mind maybe one underlying ambience right across the entire album and serving to unify it. It's only with the first track and the very last track on the recording that the Tyhjyys guys do something different - the intro being a soundscape creation of a hunting scene and the outro a purely ambient cold-space piece with low-droning throat singing and a fractured piano melody - but these serve only to highlight what else they could have done with the rest of the album but didn't.
If listeners are prepared to treat this album as an immersive soundscape head experience, they will discover some excellent if highly despairing music - but they will also find it an event not to be taken very lightly and there will be dreary moments as well. This is an example of a work that listeners can't treat casually.

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