{"id":320781,"date":"2026-03-09T14:53:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T14:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/320781\/"},"modified":"2026-03-09T14:53:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T14:53:07","slug":"the-mountain-king-pike-dreams-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/320781\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mountain King – Pike Dreams Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"My general lack of awareness and the fact that The Mountain King themselves submitted the album via contact form and didn\u2019t give much away in their promo pack left me unprepared for Pike Dreams. In the hazy air of the promo sump, I caught the word \u2018doom\u2019, but when I hit play on Pike Dreams that\u2019s not quite what I got. As much as the name and cover art seem to scream Sabbathian (neo-)classical heavy metal, stoner, and of course doom, Pike Dreams is ambient, synth-led post-rock, and it\u2019s instrumental. The German duo have been lurking around the borders of drone\/stoner\/doom since 2014, and do not operate as a solely instrumental act. That Pike Dreams speaks to its being created as \u201ca slow cycle of reflection on human history across the last two millennia,\u201d where each song is named for a particular year of great social and societal change in Europe. Marrying evocation with execution is a difficulty especially acute for instrumental music\u2014how does The Mountain King fare?<\/p>\n

As an ambient album, Pike Dreams leans heavily towards synth, with touches of piano, barely-there percussion, and heavily-muted guitars. It carries a feeling of nostalgia that manifests dualistically in fuzzed-out soundscapes and grainy warmth \u00e0 la Boards of Canada (\u201c1066,\u201d \u201c1381\u201d), and on the other through dungeon-synth, and quasi-medieval horns and melodies (\u201c1328\u201d). This seems appropriate given the record\u2019s historical concept. Its modernity surfaces in subtle hints at an industrial edge to riffs that break the surface of haze and resonate between echoing pulses, reminding me fragmentarily of Phal:Angst and Haunted Plasma (\u201c1066,\u201d \u201c1789,\u201d \u201c2026\u201d). What Pike Dreams is most of all, however, is quiet. Regardless of the music\u2019s precise direction, it remains blanketed by fog with every element subdued, magnifying the meaning of the word \u2018reflection\u2019 in the album\u2019s description.<\/p>\n

\ufeffPike Dreams by The Mountain King<\/a><\/p>\n

The Mountain King take the \u2018less is more\u2019 approach not only to volume, but also to the structure of the record and the compositions themselves. Pike Dreams could be described as fluctuating between introspective calm and confident expressiveness, but this translates to a change in intensity from 1 to 1.5 on a scale of 10. Gentle pulses trade places with blunt, horn-accented chugs (\u201c476,\u201d \u201c1789\u201d), strings and tremolo blur together in indistinct softness (\u201c1525,\u201d \u201c2010\u201d), and trap beats support liquid guitar-synth hybrids (\u201c1789,\u201d \u201c2026\u201d). Often, the blurred boundaries of physically and synthetically-crafted sounds are beautiful, melodically and precisely in their dreamlike ethereality (\u201c1066,\u201d \u201c1524\u201d). Often, however, do the persistent understatement of movement and omnipresent muting hamper Pike Dreams\u2019 ability to gain its listeners\u2019 attention. This muffling is no doubt intentional, and does work well at intervals: for instance, in the service of contrast or transition (\u201c2010\u201d); acting as a musing pause (\u201c1524\u201d); or to amplify a melody\u2019s poignancy through almost painful delicacy (\u201c1066\u201d). Yet its unequivocal application to all moments of all songs can make even the grandest passages underwhelming.<\/p>\n

In this regard, it\u2019s uncertain how a listener is meant to relate Pike Dreams to its subject matter. On the one hand, the deliberate vagueness of the soundscape mirrors a look back through the mists of time, and allows the audience to project their own sentiments onto its subtle evocation. On the other hand, this same nature prevents the audience from connecting to the music itself, and from connecting the music to its supposed year of reference. More minimalist tracks (\u201c1328,\u201d \u201c1381,\u201d \u201c2026\u201d) may work better when the listener detaches, but more expressive ones (\u201c1066,\u201d \u201c1524,\u201d \u201c2010\u201d) when the listener invests in their refrains\u2014and the ones in those tracks are often very lovely. Whether there\u2019s an issue here will be down to the role one designates to a concept album\u2014especially of the instrumental and ambient kind.<\/p>\n

Pike Dreams is as hard to pin down as you might expect from the above and from its appropriately mysterious title. As a whispering, quite beautiful, backdrop, it makes for a soothing and introspective experience that I can\u2019t deny I enjoy returning to. In many ways, it\u2019s a breath of fresh air amidst a constant storm of fast and extremely heavy music that so often fills these halls, and a chance to exhale and let go in a time of conflict and strife. The Mountain King may not have done enough to fully embody their themes or impress their compositions\u2019 identities upon the listener, but how it feels for the duration is worth something.<\/p>\n

Rating: Good
DR: 10 | Format Reviewed: VBR mp3
Label: Void Key Recordings<\/a>
Websites: Bandcamp<\/a> | Facebook<\/a>
Releases Worldwide: March 6th, 2026<\/p>\n

\n\tGive in to Your Anger:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My general lack of awareness and the fact that The Mountain King themselves submitted the album via contact…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320782,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[5921,2246,9654,173424,173425,156,9656,170095,157,111,139,153470,69,173426,173427,34571,762,763,2282,173428,173429],"class_list":{"0":"post-320781","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-electronic","9":"tag-2246","10":"tag-3-0","11":"tag-ambient","12":"tag-boards-of-canada","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-german-metal","15":"tag-mar26","16":"tag-music","17":"tag-new-zealand","18":"tag-newzealand","19":"tag-not-metal","20":"tag-nz","21":"tag-phalangst","22":"tag-pike-dreams","23":"tag-post-rock","24":"tag-review","25":"tag-reviews","26":"tag-self-releases","27":"tag-the-mountain-king","28":"tag-void-key-recordings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}