ALBUM REVIEW: The Falling Tide – Woods Of Desolation
Australia’s WOODS OF DESOLATION are arguably one of the world’s premier atmospheric/post-black metal acts. In a sub-genre that has, in recent years, begun to become stagnant with very few new acts doing anything of note with their take on the genre, this one man affair has been putting out consistently impressive albums since the release of 2008’s Towards The Depths, producing records that have gone on to be rightly regarded as modern classics. After a long musical hiatus, the band are back with their fourth studio album, The Falling Tide, another tour de force that proves to be well worth the eight-and-a-half-year wait.
Far From Here, with its ethereal guitar work and thunderous, percussive drums, is a dramatic start to the record, managing to retain a lot of the more epic qualities of the song’s opening moments even as the guitars shift towards a denser, more oppressive sound and the strangled, arid vocals kick in. The hypnotic edge provided by the rhythmic undercurrent of the track is punctuated by subtle melodic flourishes and soaring keyboard sections, making for a grandiose and powerful start to the album.
Beneath A Sea Of Stars sees the same marriage between heady post-black/shoegaze elements and a weightier blackened core being explored, with galloping drums and slick, bellicose roars and speed-driven hooks all injecting a heavier side into this monolithic piece of music that rarely goes away. It’s an urgent and frenzied approach, with the polished leads and ambient keys anchoring the track into a more atmospheric take on black metal. After the first two sprawling efforts, Illumination serves as a decidedly punchier offering, with a more energetic pace and far more domineering keyboard sound and cleaner guitar tones creeping to the fore. The aggression that was present in the preceding tracks remains, but is shrouded more effectively in the lighter sides of the band’s sound, resulting in a relatively bombastic and beguiling sound overall.
The Falling Tide follows in a similar vein, with its hurried drumming, visceral vocals and catchy, ferocious leads all helping to immediately mark this out as one of the harsher, livelier tracks on the record, and it benefits massively for it. The warm keyboard sound that has coloured each of the first three tracks is still there, but the thicker, riff-driven sound of the guitars and the imaginative twists and turns that they encompass lend a hair-raising, majestic feel to the music that makes it stick in the listener’s memory.
The Passing… is a short but hugely effective instrumental piece that leans towards a more post-rock orientated sound, with hazy, jangly guitars, haunting keyboard touches and subdued percussion all making for a crisper, tighter sound than on earlier songs. It proves that this band can be impressive even when the track in question is only intended as an interlude. Anew carries forwards a lot of the post-rock flavour that defined the previous offering, but applies a more jarring pace, more forceful performances and coarse vocals to it. It works really well, turning this into a surprisingly glorious and uplifting affair, a careful and delicate shift in the musicality on display that ultimately makes for a refreshing change of pace.
For a band that are renowned for producing records that ascend to the status of instant classic, this is yet another triumph for WOODS OF DESOLATION. Time will tell whether this record truly stands up to the stellar quality laid down on albums like Torn Beyond Reason and As The Stars, but the music on here does possess that same brilliant blend of post-black metal and atmospheric black metal ingredients that have served the band’s first three albums so well, albeit with a sharper production and a slightly wider musical range, two things that do set this album head and shoulders above quite a bit of their earlier works. With any luck, there won’t be another near nine-year gap between this album and whatever follows it, as it’s clear that WOODS OF DESOLATION are not running out of ideas any time soon.
Rating: 9/10
The Falling Tide is out now via Season Of Mist.
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