ALBUM REVIEW: The Blood You Crave – OAR

Australia’s OAR are a band that are carving out their own niche within the country’s already impressive black metal underground. With the release of their debut EP, Sect Burner in 2017, the band laid down some incredibly solid musical foundations and set a decent benchmark for their future music to overcome. Now, a little over four years since that EP was released, the band return with their debut album, The Blood You Crave, an album that marks a huge step up for the band musically, issuing a statement of intent for their future.

This album starts out strong with The Blood You Crave, an incredibly dark and visceral piece of black metal with a huge, atmospheric sound and especially grating vocals that provide a sharp contrast to slicker approach of the music. Lurching from fast and aggressive sections in its opening minutes, to crawling, doom-laden ones as it progresses, this song covers a lot of ground musically, from black metal to doom, all of which contribute significantly to making this a great, immersive opener.

Whereas the previous track was sprawling and domineering, Doomed And Damned makes for a more subdued sound, incorporating acoustic guitars, intricate drumming and spartan leads to craft something that is almost hypnotic at points, with the shrillness of the vocals and the denser rhythms that underpin the core elements serving to provide anything in the way of outright intensity. Perfect Agony is a similarly shorter affair. It couples glorious acoustic flourishes, which are utilised more prominently than on the preceding offering, with soaring riffs, preluding the more expansive and bombastic music to come. This song has a noticeably lighter and more ethereal quality to it, but achieves this without having to sacrifice too many of the more visceral components that have served the album so well up until now.

Souls Lost In The Frost, with its murkier production and more progressive style, goes in the opposite direction to the song prior to it. It adopts a ferocious edge that gives it a sound that is at points oppressive and claustrophobic and, as it develops, vitriolic and fierce, with some imaginative hooks interlaced into all this. It’s by far one of the more engrossing and dramatic pieces of music on this record, and certainly the most diverse from a compositional standpoint so far.

What Once Used To Bloom, the last full song on the album, is a slow-burning and brooding affair, gradually shifting from a monolithic slab of minimalism as it gathers momentum, peppering in subtle guitar and bass as it reaches its climax, until the music take on a gargantuan sound later on, with massive guitar chords and thunderous drums framing the biting snarls of the vocals extremely well. The doomier passages that first appeared on the album’s opener begin to creep back into the mix in the song’s closing moments, adding another dimension to the already layered sound whilst simultaneously bringing the album’s sound full circle. The brief instrumental Wrongful Death, built around brilliant melodic acoustic guitars and nothing else, is a great piece of music in its own right, but it does feel like it should have been used as an interlude between two songs as opposed to a piece to end the record on.

One of the things that is most immediately apparent when comparing this album with Sect Burner is that the songs are noticeably longer. Post-black metal is a style that is often at its best when the songs are given more time to develop, and the shorter, punchier approach on Sect Burner made each of its four tracks feel more akin to straight forward black metal, with very little time to allow the band to expand on the ideas laid down on them. This isn’t to say that their debut EP was bad, far from it; it featured a lot of great ideas and tonnes of promise. Here, the band are able to deliver on that promise, with lengthier tracks that are able to branch out a lot more. As a result, the music is far easier to get immersed in. The sharper production, and their obvious willingness to experiment with their sound with more confidence, has also aided The Blood You Crave substantially, making this an extremely impressive debut album.

Rating: 8/10

The Blood You Crave is out now via Blighttown Records.

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