Whatever the great poets have affirmed in their finest moments is the nearest we can come to an authoritative religion or truth. It is in this spirit that ROME welcomes the listener into the temple of ‘The Hierophant’, ROME’s final album of its second decade of existence. Black 180g 12″ vinyl. High quality, super-audiophile disc – German pressing!
‘The Hierophant’ represents the enigmatic accompanying piece to the more introspective and seclusive recent work (of ‘The Tower’). Starting its journey during these ‘Days of Assembly’, from the opening ‘Secret Harbour’ along ‘On Sorrow’s Embankment’ to its logical finale in the mythical North with ‘Apollo of Hyperborea’; ‘The Hierophant’ is a spiritual travelogue seeking out the word and world of this ‘My Frail Ambassador’, the proclaimer of the sacred truce, interpreter of the ancestral laws and our guiding light through these darkened times. Through a magical web looped from atmospheric guitar work, Reuter looks beyond the world’s grim realities as ‘The Harvest Is Not Here’. The songs are both enigmatic and touching, a strange sacrament, elusive and half-hidden, like the gospel of a soft cult.
Musically, the radically reduced folk of earlier work is still very much present, though different in calibre. ‘The Hierophant’ proclaims its truths not from a place of solitude and remote resistance, but from the threshold of the beyond. Sprinkled with sparse percussion and dream-like string sections, the album invites the listener to participate in an aural rite of passage, invoking echoes of forgotten rituals and the tremors of inner transformation. Reuter’s guitar work and lyrical strength is particularly strong on this release. Each track unfolds like a veiled scripture, it is a collection of layered sonic devotion adorned with symbols and spells, demanding attentive and repeated listening.

Tracks:

A1 Secret Harbour
A2 The Harvest is not here
A3 Days of Assembly
A4 On Sorrow’s Embankment
A5 The Chalice and the Blad
eB2 When Light be gone
B2 The Great white Hopeless
B3 My frail Ambassador
B4 The Gods are slow to forgive
B5 Apollo of Hyperborea