At times “Dusty Lord” losses the battle between interesting melodies, tempo changes and a well formulated song structure, this because of the great amount of changes, tunes, ideas and moods placed on the songs, it does show that the album is written as a whole not as individual songs trying to top each other.

So what does Arcanar plays? Doom/Death/Progressive/Goth metal, a big mix in this one, and that’s perhaps the main reason why the album sometimes sounds like is about to fall apart, but thanks to songs like “Insomnia” a track that places heavy guitar riffs, right next to a beautiful instrumentation, splitting the melodies into energetic, melodic and absorbing, the album escapes disaster and gives you a “save” feeling when the piano is included.

Arcanar’s music varies and morphs through out the entire 42 minutes of length, at times they can sound a bit depressing and even boring, but is just for a couple of seconds because they always find a way to bring an interesting twist to every song, sometimes with fast tempos others with a nice bass line and sometimes with orchestra like incursions, “Dusty Lord” is almost impossible to describe using one genre in metal, that’s why I mention a list of genres that participate in order to create a unique and refreshing sound.

The album has two instrumental pieces, both with a beautiful acoustic guitar that gives a bohemian smell to Arcanar, those songs are “Etude #1” and yes you guest it “Etude #2”, their placement within the record is also very predetermine, like a glass of water between two different flavors of wine, they cleanse the previous sound in order to introduce a new set of melodies.

Just by listening to “Without Changes” you can see this Russian band’s formula in action, a heavy and deep intro with death metal growls and then a soft, melancholic clean vocal segment is introduce just to come back and interlace both rhythms and styles to create their death/doom metal with tons of help from many other genres and sounds.

Like I mention earlier, the album could have gotten a better score if sometimes the songs didn’t sound like they were going to fall apart from the use of too many elements, sometimes the songs are a little over charged with tempo variation and instruments, still the album is a great way of listening to a blend of genres and liking every single one of them put together.