Oh sure, I’ve serenaded the dusky welkin with the occasional anthem, I’ve been disciplined in fire and demise, I’ve enjoyed the periodic nightside eclipse and even [insert something clever about the self-titled Emperor album here], but there is a fandom cult league for highly influential Norwegian black metallers Emperor to which I simply don’t belong. Not that I can’t or don’t appreciate the records, I just don’t salivate like a Pavlovian dog at the mere mention of their titles.

Accordingly, I feel in some strange way qualified to review After, the third post-Emperor solo outing of frontman Ihsahn (né Vegard Sverre Tveitan). I’m familiar with his work, but not masturbatingly so; having heard both 2008’s angL and 2006’s The Adversary, it’s possible to have some sense of what he’s done since Emperor’s disbanding and what exactly he’s changing up with After. You know, other than throwing in some free jazz saxophone and that kind of thing.

Ihsahn, who also recorded After in his Symphonique Studio, still plays with the melodies and progressive death metalisms he showed on angL, it it’s not until the title track, third of the total eight, that that side really shows up. The first two tracks, “The Barren Lands” and “A Grave Inversed” — the latter featuring that aforementioned free jazz saxophone — are righteously heavy and nearly if not completely blackened metal. Even on “After,” Ihsahn’s vocals morph into his trademark throaty approach, although they do so over an angular Opethian riff with single notes layered before shifting back into a melodic chorus. Nothing’s ever the same.

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