A Hidden Gem in the Howling Void
I stumbled across Pale Swordsman by accident.
Played it once.
Played it twice.
And suddenly, I’d been listening to it all day.
This album is everything I love about black metal:
the loneliness, the rawness, the poetry—all bleeding together in lo-fi devotion.
Këkht Aräkh (and no, I have absolutely no idea how to pronounce that) is the one-man project of Crying Orc (Dmytro Marchenko), who handles every instrument, every rasp, every frozen echo.
Since 2018, he’s quietly built a discography of aching, feral beauty—culminating, for me, in this record.
The Pale Swordsman: A Vampire’s Lament
Lyrically, Pale Swordsman follows its title character—a vampire, trapped between worlds, mourning everything he’s lost.
Love, mortality, time, himself.
Unlike most black metal lyricism (Satan, wolves, chainsaws, insert nihilism here), these songs read like actual poetry.
You can understand most of it straight from the recordings—if not, reading along is absolutely worth your time.
The lo-fi production, the stark artwork, the frail rasp of the vocals:
everything pulls you into the swordsman's doomed orbit.
Soundtrack to a Moonless Night
The album opens with a mournful piano intro—delicate, lonely—before slipping seamlessly into Thorns, a song of frail guitarwork, frantic drums, and broken-glass vocals.
It hits immediately: melancholy sharpened into sound.
Night Descends follows with relentless drumming and even harsher riffs—the mantra "Wandering in the night, Pale Swordsman" drops for the first time, and sticks like a curse.
In the Garden slows things down—a rare, painful stillness.
The lyrics ache for an ending the vampire cannot have.
| "Breathing the fragrance of night,
| I long for the end."
Space to Breathe, Space to Bleed
What Pale Swordsman does so brilliantly is knowing when to pull back.
The instrumental tracks (Amor, Nocturne, Lily) aren’t filler—they’re breathing spaces.
Little frozen lakes between the storms.
Then Amid the Stars storms back, harsher and more desperate, the vampire surrendering to his hunt.
And finally—Crystal and Swordsman—the album closes in a hush of broken beauty.
The last track is so delicate it feels like it might shatter if you breathe wrong.
Clear vocals.
Simple, devastating piano.
A final confession:
| "For you, I rid myself of evil."
Final Thoughts
Pale Swordsman felt like stumbling into a secret world—one stitched together with lo-fi production, broken poetry, and just the right amount of glorious overkill.
It’s dramatic.
It’s a little cheesy.
It’s a vampire concept album, for fuck’s sake.
But when the mood is right—when you need something fragile and feral and unashamedly emotional—it absolutely lands.
I played it on repeat for days.
And even now, it feels less like music and more like a shared hallucination.
Some albums ask you to headbang.
Some ask you to rage.
This one?
It just asks you to bleed a little quieter.