ALBUM REVIEW: American Gothic – Wayfarer
Within the world of black metal there’s not a lot of modern bands that genuinely stand apart from the rest, not just in the way they approach their music, but also in their lyrics and imagery. This is doubly the case with the vast majority of atmospheric black metal, a corner of the genre where often weak musicianship is propped up by overbearing keyboard melodies. So when a band of this stripe comes along and not only sounds great, but are arguably one of the best black metal acts operating within the current scene, you can be sure that a lot of Snow Juggalos with an ear for the cutting edge will sit up and take notice. WAYFARER are one such band; incorporating elements of bluegrass, folk and country into their sound and exclusively dealing with the American Frontier as a subject matter, the Colorado-based quartet have been creating some incredible black metal since the release of 2014’s Children Of the Iron Age, with the band’s fourth album, 2020’s excellent A Romance With Violence, garnering them some well-deserved international attention. Their fifth album, American Gothic, doubles down on the many strengths of its predecessor, resulting in perhaps the band’s best work to date.
The Thousand Tombs Of Western Promise, with its dark bluegrass-inflected sound, starts this album off with some exceptionally powerful music that immediately grabs the listener’s attention, gradually shifting into a hazy atmospheric black metal sound that accentuates the band’s trademark cavernous rhythms and slick, melodic leads. The searing vocals and galloping drums add a harsher undercurrent to this fairly hypnotic affair, adding to the layered and eclectic sound and making for an incredibly epic and memorable introduction. The Cattle Thief is centred around dancing guitar work, tight drumming and caustic vocal performances, providing an energetic sound that is extremely punchy, with the excellent riffs being interwoven amongst more ethereal sections and cacophonous bursts to offer a lively take on the style of the opener that shifts seamlessly from one brilliant component to the next and contains enough interesting ideas to fill three songs.
Reaper On The Oilfields is a shorter, acoustic-heavy track with haunting, opaque vocals and subdued drums that make this feel a lot more reserved than the preceding two behemoths, belying the sinister subject matter and changing the pace of the album drastically by stripping away almost all of the black metal. To Enter My House Justified strikes a balance between the intricate hooks of The Cattle Thief and the bellicose, driven moments within the album’s opener, reverting to an epic style with a greater emphasis on soaring leads and angular passages, and ebbing and flowing between these sharper motifs and warm ambience to create another engrossing and diverse piece of music.
A High Plains Eulogy introduces Hammond organs quite prominently which, when coupled with clean vocals and shimmering acoustic guitar, acts as another fantastic, mellow inclusion to the record that breaks up the fiercer elements of previous tracks whilst possessing enough distinct elements to make it stand out for all the right reasons. 1934, a brief instrumental interlude with a minimalistic approach, is a great way to segue into the following track, Black Plumes Over God’s Country, which, after two songs that were decidedly more reserved and atmosphere-drenched, lurches back towards monolithic black metal. The polished guitars and acidic shrillness of the vocals make this feel more visceral than earlier tracks, although the clean singing and acoustic touches of the previous two tracks still feature at the heart of the music, especially towards its climactic moments.
False Constellation pushes the guitar sound into hazy, borderline psychedelic territories, which works extremely well alongside the spartan but effective keyboards and myriad ingredients that make this an incredibly powerful and broad offering, with everything from the caustic vocals, thunderous drums and acoustic flourishes developing a huge, imposing sound that, in spite of its vast musical scope, manages to make room for grandiose hooks which help to make this not only a fitting conclusion to the album, but arguably one of its best tracks.
Following up an album of the calibre of A Romance With Violence seems like an almost insurmountable task, but WAYFARER have not only met the lofty benchmark that album set, but surpassed it with American Gothic. Although each of their five albums are impressive in their own right, it feels that with these two most recent ones the band have finally not only settled upon a formula with their music, but all but perfected it, allowing them to stand head and shoulders above all but a scant few acts within the global black metal scene. Every moment on this album is fantastic, and perhaps more so than its predecessor, WAYFARER have managed to blend together their smorgasbord of influences to create an album that is quite unlike anything else within extreme metal in the process.
Rating: 10/10
American Gothic is out now via Century Media Records.
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