Beltane for the less paganly educated amongst you is the name given to a pre Christian fire festival which if memory serves me correctly take place on the 30th of April to welcome the arrival of summer and is still celebrate in some parts of Scotland and north of England

This Beltane on the other hand is an accomplished and interesting band from Australia. So what are they like? I’m begrudge to use the term but I suppose they

could be considered to 'gothic’ in their approach to music, the album is made up of complex   musical layers, reliant heavily on the electronic, keyboards ,loops. Oh great you think another one of those bands…you would of course be wrong.

The ‘music’ on the tracks is reminiscent of early less complicated arrangements of VNV nation, covenant, and Absurd minds

The melody of the music works really well but with the vocals adds eeriness and haunting simplistic beauty to the album surprisingly the vocals are not over powered by the heavy synth and bass of the tracks

The EP/album has a number of stand out tracks on it on the fly it which reminds me of damn the lie by absurd minds and I still find myself bopping to it, another stand out track is dynoison, with its heavy tribal feel to it and the chant like vocals, broken by simple and haunting strings, followed closely by the title track and the enchanted ocean a heavily instrumental track that draws you in.

The weakest track, and even then it is not bad song, is Foreign shore  which I found to derivative of SOM, which is no reason to condemn them I have just moved on  from that style of music.

Anyway a good album five excellent tracks one alright track and one so so track.

You can listen to the best and the worst of the album on Leaving hope radio. If you want to find out more about Beltane visit their site, if you want to get yourself a copy of the CD you can get it from here.