Fauna - Ochre & Ash [2LP Oxblood Red]

Ochre & Ash is Fauna's fourth full length, a shamanic death and rebirth ritual pressed to oxblood red 2LP vinyl, which might be the most correct color choice yet.

Fauna formed in Olympia, Washington in 2004, built around a drive to explore shamanism and atavism, the resurfacing of traits human culture supposedly left behind. That drive became black metal, and Fauna helped found Cascadian black metal alongside Agalloch and Wolves in the Throne Room, a scene less interested in corpse paint theatrics than genuine ritual. Ochre & Ash pushes that furthest yet. Six tracks look like a normal album on the back cover, but the band built it as one continuous piece, three songs stitched together with ambient interludes into a single shamanic journey, a ritual death, a harrowing passage, and a rebirth on the other side.

Nature & Madness kicks things off with the record's most direct sense of dread, Femoral Sun buries a genuine hook under layers of tremolo and ritual drone, and Mockery is where the harrowing passage turns physical, all blast beats and buried chanting. Eternal Return closes the cycle exactly where a rebirth should land, calm and strangely warm, echoing the ochre and ash ancient hands once pressed onto cave walls at Cueva de las Manos.

This oxblood red pressing makes the ritual physical too.