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ALBUM REVIEW: Dwaallicht – Witte Wieven

Tilburg’s WITTE WIEVEN are one of the most promising acts to emerge within the impressive Dutch black metal underground that has developed over the last ten years. Although the band are often given the atmospheric black metal tag, they are a world removed from many of their peers who are pigeon-holed in a similar manner. Right from the release of their Silhouettes Of An Imprisoned Mind EP in 2016, it’s been very clear that this is a band that are drawing from a much broader pallet than many of their contemporaries, opting for shoegaze and post-rock elements in place of over-bearing keyboard melodies. The band’s first full length, Dwaallicht, is a stunning debut album, and it sets them a lofty benchmark to surpass very early on.

Ontsponnen Uit De Diepte quickly sheds the ethereal touches that it begins with, replacing them with dissonant, weighty guitars and thunderous percussion, with arid vocals creeping in as the song progresses to inject a harshness into the music. The airier leads provide a polished contrast to the darker, denser approach of the rest of the track, informing everything with a majestic quality that makes this even more atmospheric.

Koorddanser leans prominently into this lighter side of the band’s sound, with crystalline guitars and clean vocals alongside intricate drumming applying a more delicate sound. It’s quite reserved and hypnotic in places, before bursting into a fiercer motif centred upon murkier tones and shrieking vocals to counterpoint the first half perfectly. Drogbeeld is another slow-burning, imaginative piece of music that allows the drums and bass to come to the fore, driving the track with a tight but repetitive rhythm, with a few spartan guitars and vocals peppered throughout that provide a haunting ambience and let the subtler components drive the sound even when the bleaker, blackened closer appears, once again making the softer moments the music’s focal point.

Het Mistige Zicht reverts to a shorter, punchier format and utilises the sort of gradual shift from post-rock and shoegaze towards black metal that that first songs embraced, starting out with drums and bass and slowly layering the harsher elements of the guitars and vocals into the mix, albeit whilst blending this spectrum of influences together more effectively, with the lines between musical shifts being less distinct than on earlier efforts. Kringen, another brief but brilliant piece of music, opts for a sludgy guitar and bass sound, along with booming, percussive drums. These give this a borderline doom metal sound, although the hellish howl of the vocals, slicker leads and magnificently chaotic middle section keep this song anchored within black metal, and it proves to be an impressive conclusion for the album proper.

The final song to appear on this record is Met Beide Benen In Het Niets, a live rendition of a track that first appeared on a split the band did with REIZIGER in 2018. It’s an incredibly loyal representation of the original, and captures the jangling guitars, heady atmospherics and dramatic qualities of the recorded version, showing that this band are capable of delivering live as well as in the studio. However, a re-recorded version, rather than a live one, might have fit better here, as after the cohesiveness of the rest of the album, a live track does feels almost tacked on as an afterthought, and slightly undermines the impact of an otherwise fantastic record.

This solitary gripe aside, it’s hard to think of an atmospheric black metal act that have managed to produce a more stunning debut in recent years than WITTE WIEVEN have done with Dwaallicht. This is in no small part due to the way that the band have approached writing in this style; although blending together black metal, shoegaze and post-rock is certainly far from a new concept, the way that the band slowly shift from one style to the next lends an epic, cinematic quality to each of the five original tracks on here, making it far more memorable than any combination of weak guitars and vocals supplemented by domineering keyboards that is more typical of black metal’s more atmospheric acts in recent years. It’s a fantastic album, made even more impressive by the fact that it is their first, and was written and recorded by just two people, and hopefully it will set the tone for even more brilliant music in the future.

Rating: 9/10

Dwaallicht - Witte Wieven

Dwaallicht is out now via Babylon Doom Cult Records.

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