Cân Bardd – Devoured by the Oak

I was trying not to write this. I’ve been shoving this off. I knew the moment I tried to talk about this record, I’d spiral into yet another full-body experience. Because Devoured by the Oak didn’t just impress me—it crawled in quietly and refused to leave. And now I’m here again, calming down my nervous system with Une couronne de branches, muttering "goddammit" between sighs, and realising: this one’s a keeper. So. Can't be helped. Might as well bleed about it properly.

 

Cân Bardd hail from Geneva, Switzerland. Just two people: Dylan Watson on drums, Malo Civelli on literally everything else—vocals, guitars, bass, orchestration, keys, grief management. Devoured by the Oak is their third full-length, released in 2021. And it’s not just an album. It’s a one-hour ritual on surrender, beauty, and being gently obliterated by natural forces. Trees, mostly.

Blastbeats surge. Riffs slice in cold. The flute keeps weaving underneath, stubbornly soft. And then come the clean vocals—at first underneath, like a choir rising from the forest floor. They round the edges. Make the song soar and float—not toward anything, just into everything. There’s a moment, around the six-minute mark, where the whole thing pauses—gathers breath—and you think maybe that was it. But no. It comes back stronger.

 

Now the clean vocals take the lead, full-on choral, carried by blastbeats and backlit with rasps. The melody doesn’t break—it ascends. It becomes massive. Softness and harshness layered so deliberately it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. It’s cinematic, but never overblown. Controlled. Earned.

 

This track floored me instantly. Immediate imprint. Heart cracked open. 

Une couronne de branches is my favourite on the album. No doubt. No discussion. Don't even look at me.

 

It is the one I keep crawling back to. 

Between Une couronne de branches and Blomsterkransen stretches the rest of the album: a near hour-long drift through grief, surrender, and something that feels a lot like transformation. The tracks don’t really end. They blur, deliberately. Flowing into each other through atmosphere—carefully layered transitions, recurring motifs, and some of the most seamless mixing I’ve heard in a while. Unless the band wants you to notice a change, you won’t. You’ll just find yourself in the next song like you wandered there half-asleep, carried by whatever ancient force is narrating all this.

 

The title track, Devoured by the Oak, stretches across two parts—eight minutes each, and utterly inseparable. There’s no clean break. Just a shift. A deepening. Like crossing a threshold you didn’t notice until it was already behind you.

 

It starts stripped back. Clean vocals, gentle acoustic guitar, and some other instrument I genuinely can’t name for the life of me. Whatever it is, it sounds like breathing—like stepping into something sacred without being told the rules. And once again, the composition is just—absurdly good. Percussion, choirs, orchestration—everything is arranged so deliberately, so carefully, that by the end the song has swelled into something massive. Sorrowful. Beautiful. Completely inevitable.

 

Part I ends with full-blown epic weight: choirs at full force, repeating a chorus that suddenly feels ancient. Like it’s always been there. Then it drops. One last raw, croaked line—

 

| Deep in the forest I'm drifting into a silent spleen

| Waiting for the elder tree to end my pain

 

—then Part II begins. And it doesn’t just start. It takes you.

 

Blastbeats, sharp and immediate. Everything more urgent now. More internal. This is the part where surrender stops being metaphorical. The melody stays—it always stays—but now it’s transformed. No more edge-of-the-forest imagery. This is grief from the inside out. Death, not as ending, but as unraveling. Dissolution, yes. But peaceful. Beautiful, even. Like something cracking open in the dark to let in light you didn’t expect.

 

The melody sticks with you. That choral swell. Days later, I’m humming it under my breath like I’ve been tasked with carrying some ancient saga in my chest. Something vast. Something wordless.

 

And that’s the movement of the album overall. It starts grounded—in dirt, in rain, in branches—and slowly lets go of form. Crépuscule starts off harsh and bleak. Less dreamy, less forest-soft. The atmosphere feels colder here—but then, halfway through, everything drops away. And in comes the violin.

 

Fading in slowly. Gentle at first. Building.

 

And when the blastbeats and growls return—when it all hits again—I can actually feel my heart open up.  It’s not pretty. It’s beautiful, which is messier. Which hurts. There’s longing. There’s weight. There’s so much emotion overspilling the edges it almost feels reckless.

 

The violin, honestly, makes this piece for me. That, and the way everything crashes back in: tremolo riffs, blastbeats, rasps, choirs, orchestrations—all of it. It’s massive. It’s rewarding. And somehow, by the end, it feels like the sun is finally setting. And it is a relief.

 

Spleen by the Pond is an instrumental, but not an intermission. It’s the breath before another plunge. Synths. Droning atmosphere. Echoes. And it leads straight into Autumn Shore without pause—another seamless transition that proves Cân Bardd don’t really write tracks. They write passages.

 

Autumn Shore closes the story, thematically. Death, now, is water. We float. There’s less despair here—more reverence. More resignation. We don’t end in transcendence, but in something quieter. Obscured beauty.

 

Musically, it kicks in hard. Blastbeats. Rough vocals. Less folk, more black metal. The epicness doesn’t come from flutes or acoustic flourishes this time—it’s in the arrangement. The scope. And yes, fine, the choirs. Again. They do a lot of heavy lifting. But mostly, this one feels darker. Sharper. It leans into the storm a little more.

 

Even with the flutes.

 

Same story. Same bones. The bird still falls. The body is still carried. The grave is still dug. A crown is still placed. But everything else shifts: the language, the delivery, the weight of the silence between lines.

 

Une couronne de branches feels closer to the wound. The grief still sharp, the voice catching.

Blomsterkransen stands at a distance—not detached, but steadier. It’s not healed. Just—quieter. Like retelling the same loss years later with your hand resting calmly on the table this time.

 

They’re not translations. They’re echoes.

Two ways of carrying the same pain.

 

Blomsterkransen doesn’t just close the album—it lets it settle. Not as a descent, but as a return. Not as collapse, but as a cycle. A memory reshaped into song.

 

And it’s so well done it makes me want to scream into a pile of flower crowns.

Devoured by the Oak isn’t a playlist album. It’s not made for skimming, or picking favourites (even though we all know mine). It’s one long, deliberate movement—from grief to surrender to something that looks suspiciously like peace. You don’t just listen to it. You enter it. And then it carries you off somewhere mossy and quiet and refuses to return you unchanged.

 

This is everything I love about atmospheric black metal.

Light and dark.

Soft and harsh.

Beautiful. Devastating.

All of it. All at once.

 

What Cân Bardd have built here isn’t just impressive—it’s total. Musically. Emotionally. Structurally. Everything flows. Everything aches. And none of it overstays.

 

It doesn’t ask for anything outrageous. Just your attention. Your presence. Maybe your heart.

 

Honestly? It took mine. Quietly. Like roots wrapping around a stone.