unfortunately that production is what makes black metal sound so pretty. underratedly beautiful genre.
I was speaking about the production used on melodic death metal being brick walled. Black metal
isn't brick walled, and tends to have a dirtier but more dynamic overall approach to production, which as you say, adds to the experience and overall feel of the music. most modern metal production tends to be brick-walled, but genres such as black metal have stayed true to old school, more dynamic production, with some of it - Wolves in the Throne Room for example - even allowing amplifier artifacts and random unintended guitar noise into the recording. These things never appear on the over-polished Finnish sad boi death metal, for example - that stuff is all put through the same glossy production machine, which becomes tiresome pretty quickly. I like the songs and the writing etc., but the production leaves something to be desired.
Black metal still brings the goods in most cases, especially bands like
Agalloch, which is sort of mellow black metal, or my favorite black metal band,
Moonsorrow, which has a pretty much unassailable discography of amazing music throughout their entire career. Check out their record
Viides luku – Hävitetty for an example of two close to 30 minute long epic black metal tracks with a folk influence.
More recently, check out
Eternal Shroud's record,
Trisagion.
Listening to the round now, btw!