The Rime Of Memory - Panopticon: Review

Panopticon

is a Kentucky-based black metal project spearheaded by Austin Lunn. The band drew critical acclaim for its combination of the brutality of black metal with the sounds and occasionally even the themes of Appalachian folk music. After operating on a particularly prolific schedule early in its career, Panopticon has slowed down in recent years though Rime is the 10th album from the project.

Review by Lav:

I still have a ton of fondness for the era that's considered Panopticon's classic period. The stretch of albums from Kentucky to Road To The North still sounds incredibly impressive, unique, and creative even in hindsight. Though there was only one album between that and 2021's And Again Into The Light it represented a six-year gap in releases I really loved. But after hearing Again my interest in the band was revitalized in a big way and I was excited to see where they went next. 

The Rime Of Memory sees Panopticon at its most chilling. It's made up in large part of just 5 very long songs and I can pretty honestly say I like three of them. The album gets off to a good start with Winter's Ghost a monstrous 20-minute de-facto opener. It gets underway with a long frigid folk passage that eventually transitions into the kind of weighty and crushing black metal you'd expect. The second transition back into metal later in the song happens much less suddenly and its my favorite part of the track as it spends entire minutes creeping towards its bleakest sound with driving instrumentation and harrowing screams. 

While I'm not crazy about the middle of the record it really picks up at the end. Enduring The Snow Drought. has a particularly strong second half with a surprisingly frenetic instrumental breakdown. It also features one of the album's most blistering performances on the vocal end to create a pretty dynamic cut that perfectly fills its 12-minute runtime. That leads into closing track The Blue Against The White which serves as a great finale for the album in particular. It sports some surprising post-rock-ish passages in the first half that really do feel expressive and necessary for what is essentially the grand finale to a harrowing album. Those splashes of extra instrumentation re-emerge again later on the song making for highlights like the wiry soaring guitar leads around 6 minutes in. I love how bleak and isolating it feels by the end of the song it feels like the perfect way to end things off.

Unfortunately, in the middle of the record, I think Lynn tries to interpolate some extra sounds into the music here that I'm not crazy about. Cedar Skeletons is the more digestible of the examples dropping the hammer right away upping the intensity to something violent and crushing.It saves its most reserved moments for later in the track when it introduces some vocal samples into the mix. While it does add some thematic context I wonder if it's at the expense of the sound. The album is often at its best leaning into more rustic influences which makes the sound collage approach stand out in the wrong way. An Autumn Storm is easily my least favorite song on the album. I don't really find the core of the song all that compelling and many of the extra splashes of instrumentation doused on it tend to do more harm than good. 

The Rime Of Memory certainly has strong moments but the lull it goes on in the middle is a bit of a tough ask. On top of having some of the most uncomfortable moments in the Panopticon discography to date, I don't think the harrowing and intense high points on the record hit quite as hard as I'm used to. With that in mind, the album is still unique in the metal landscape and presents some monumental compositions that I do enjoy engaging with. Even if this isn't Panopticon at their best, it's still an enjoyable outing from a project that typically always delivers something at least worth digesting. 6/10

For more black metal check out my review of Liturgy's 93696