Since I started listening to black metal, I've encountered all sorts of atmospheres within the genre: vicious, inspiring, depressing, grim and frostbitten, etc. Before listening to Woodtemple's Sorrow of the Wind, however, I had never really encountered anything I could call soothing.

To be fair, to call the entire album soothing is a bit of a stretch. In previous albums, Woodtemple has been known for atmospheric pagan metal with a depressive touch, and this style definitely still comes through here. The guitar, which is generally placed low in the mix, uses the sort of melancholy riffs one would generally expect from music of this nature. The vocals are nothing remarkable, merely a lackluster croak that thankfully doesn't dominate the songs.

Things get interesting, however, when the music departs from these motifs. Sometimes the distorted guitar gets replaced by a clean one strumming folk riffs, and the drums occasionally move into a tribal, tom-heavy style. These sections can be quite hypnotic, even relaxing, a feeling augmented greatly by the fairly heavy use of a flute (which may or may not be synth) throughout several of the songs. This is most noticeable in the horribly misnamed “Rise Up the Horns to Battle”, which, rather than the charged anthem one might expect, feels downright peaceful when the flute kicks in. As a flute player, I'm aware that it's possible for a flute to sound aggressive, yet it never does here, even when it plays over a distorted guitar.

There are only three full songs on the album, with the other three tracks being transition pieces that emphasize the soothing atmosphere even further. “The Shields Light” is the most forward and traditional of the pieces, feeling more in line with what one would expect from the first song, given its title. The title track sounds like something of a combination of the two, with a few genuinely edgy sections modulating the easy-going sound of the more pagan bits. It's probably the best song on the album, and remarkably chill. At times, it verges on the epic, but it seems a bit too relaxed to fully get there.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. Not all music needs to be face-meltingly intense or to rouse the listener into a righteous fury, a la Bathory. Really, the more subdued parts of the album are the best, since they differ most from what I've heard before. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure this feeling was intentional, but regardless of whether it was, it seems to work. You won't like this album if you're looking for something particularly in-your-face, or if you detest repetition—there's a lot of it. However, if you're looking for something atmospheric and easy-going, this isn't a bad time.