ALBUM REVIEW: White Noise and Black Metal – Craft
Sweden’s CRAFT are one of the best black metal bands in a country already renowned for producing world class black metal. In their two decades long tenure on the front line of the genre’s underground, they have consistently produced some of the most visceral and acerbic black metal that their nation has to offer, with each of their first four records being bonafide, overlooked classics of the genre. Their latest, fifth record, White Noise and Black Metal, their first in almost seven years, continues with this trend, giving us yet another mind blowing slab of vicious and cerebral black metal.
The album’s opener, The Cosmic Sphere Falls, is a bleakly sharp, dissonant piece of black metal that couples a solid, old school approach to song-writing with a modern and fresh production, without sacrificing any of the intensity and darkness of the music. The guitars has some great, off-kilter melodies which set a jarring and eerie tone for the track and complement the acidic, snarling vocals perfectly. It’s classic black metal with a decidedly discordant twist, and acts as an excellent way to kick the album off.
Again is another eerie and cacophonous slab of grating black metal, and it possesses an absolutely monstrous sound, from the way that the music is performed to the raw edge of the production. The guitars are allowed to head into far more experimental territory on this track, and it helps to add to the brilliant weirdness and grim atmosphere. Undone is a track that is characterised by blistering speeds, cutting, visceral guitars and equally acerbic and vicious vocals. It is, in many ways, a continuation of the sound and style of the first two tracks, with sudden time changes and overly bleak music, but steers slightly towards a more tried and tested, old school style, without completely abandoning the gnarly progressive tinges that are there. It’s a fairly long track, and manages to create a foreboding and grandiose atmosphere, and fit in a plethora of different riffs, vocal passages and complex drumming, all of which help make this track one of the album’s most notable highlights.
Tragedy of Pointless Games is another far more monolithic track from CRAFT that sounds unerringly huge, due mostly to the thunderous, primal drumming and the expansive, ethereal guitars. It has plenty of intricate melodies liberally strewn throughout it, but this is nonetheless a far more minimalist affair when it comes to the music. It moves at a much slower pace than the preceding track, which helps to allow the listener to absorb all of the music and styles CRAFT have to offer. The tempo of the song does, at some point past the half way mark, increase exponentially and return to a more speed orientated pace, and the song begins to sound all the more bestial and ferocious for it. This is an excellent, slow burning track that will have listeners hooked on the first listen.
White Noise and Black Metal‘s second half begins with Darkness Falls, a beastly track with an infectious, memorable groove and tight, precise drumming acting as a solid base for the track. The vocals soar over this really well, and cut through the mix to seize the listeners attention as soon as they appear. With a few grim sounding, chaotic sections thrown into the equation to add some variety, it’s a great track that applies the black metal aesthetic and sound to hard rock guitar hooks and the solid rhythm section. Crimson sees the band embrace an impressively complex and progressive musical approach, with a great, dancing opening riff that creates a hypnotic feel for this particular track. The drums, likewise, stick to a steady, measured metre, and other than a few brilliant guitar licks and some sparsely incorporated vocals towards the songs closing moments, this track doesn’t stray too far from the riff that opened it. It’s a great change of pace, and it would be great to see CRAFT incorporate this kind of style into their music in the future.
YHVH’s Shadow sees a continuation of some of the album’s earlier, darker moments, with a lot of jarring, vicious sounding guitars, drenched in a raw and shrill tone, machine gun tight drums and some truly arid and fierce sounding vocals all making this one of the most oppressively harsh and aggressive tracks on the whole record. It’s got some amazingly thick, robust guitars that really add a lot to the sound, and complement the intensity of the drumming very well. There’s some great, chaotic and cacophonous moments where the music takes a markedly more frenzied turn, and this injects yet more venom and viciousness into an already powerful song. White Noise, the album’s closing track, is far removed from the sound of the last track; it’s a much more straight forward black metal track, with beefy, robust guitar grooves heading up the aural assault that it provides. It’s got some really impressive musicianship, and provides a really solid slab of black metal to bring the album to a close on a high note.
White Noise and Black Metal is an excellent record that has all of the hallmarks of CRAFT‘s style and sound, and once again gives the listener an incredibly intense and aggressive musical experience. It’s sound and approach are firmly rooted within black metal’s raw and feral side, with plenty of interesting and discordant motifs thrown into the mix to provide some added intensity and fierceness to an already heady mix of extremity. White Noise and Black Metal definitely feels like a worthy successor to Void, and proves to be yet another instant classic for a band who’ve practically made a career out of producing instant classics.
Rating: 8/10
White Noise and Black Metal is out now via Season of Mist – Underground Activists.
Like CRAFT on Facebook.