Darker than the blackest shadows and grimmer than terminal bowel cancer, Wardaemonic lurk in the shadows of Perth, joylessly composing their hymns to madness and despair.
From the ultra-grim cover to the almost unreadably shadowy lyrical content, "Echoes of Ageless flames' takes us on a journey into the bleakest of realms, a land of moving shadows and malevolent spirits. In this metal world of extremes, true black metal of this kind is possibly the extreme extremity of extremes, skirting the jagged edge of the point where music and white noise collide. The sound is typical of the Scandanavian black metal sound, ragged, ugly and driven so hard that the underlying melody is sometimes hard to distinguish, taking all the most sinister elements of the genre and crafting their own anthems of demonic glee and inhuman suffering.
Although they incorperate many elements of traditional black metal into their sound and image, Wardaemonic - and bless their little cotton socks for this - seem to have stepped away from the trend followed by the bands of this genre of being "true" by making the most low-grade and indecipherable recordings they can. To put it another way, this album has all the malicious hate and black despair of the bands they draw influence from, but is actually listenable. Heaven forfend!
Being no specialist in the reviewing of this blackest form of metal, I am somewhat limited in my understanding and experience of this sort of dire and foreboding music, but I do hear some recognisable influences in the music. The way the album starts off with a strange array of dark churning effect and Hellish noise and builds slowly throughout the whole song is reminiscent of Bathory's epic "Blood Fire Death", but the structuring of some of the material sounds more to me in the vicinity of early Kvist or Burzum, certainly closer in feel to the early pioneers of the genre rather than the modern interpretations.
On this album Wardaemonic have developed their style, sliding between ferocious songs with abrasive and ghastly vocals and the slower and more eerie and dramatic songs with painless transition, smoothly fetid like a ghoul slipping into a crypt to feed. It is when they combine the two in a single song however like the 10th track "Paths to Silence" that they find something truly impressive, behind the arbitrary wall of noise there is a lot more going on, it just waits to be found. Much as I like my metal nasty, it is in these moments of duality that Wardaemonic reach me, for between the blasting and snarling guitar tones, there are times when Wardaemonic show a good understanding of melody and artistic vision, the balance of vile intensity and the creation of dark soundscapes.
Sometimes on "Echoes of Ageless Flames" they back it down even further, removing almost all the more aggressive instrumentation and drumming. Song 7 "Incarnate Ethereal of Nine" (I think so anyway, fucking hard to read the shit) is an example of this, with Vocals delivered clean and then soaked in buckets of reverb and effect to create a ghostly song full of images of desolation, pain and inconsolable grief. As if this wasn't suprise enough, song 9 "Veils of Winter Mystercism" (I think) is 2 minutes of nothing but dark and brooding keyboard chords and effect, totally didn't see that coming at all.
Even so, there is little on this CD that could pass as even slightly uplifting, the theme is horribly unhappy and dripping with depressed hatred. Old, Maelstrom, Regnator, Blitz and Anharat (I shall leave out their real names) have worked together well on this CD. Everyone seems to contribute well, even in a band with a drummer as accomplished as Maelstrom nobody stands out as being dominant and indispensible. On "Echoes of Ageless Flames" Wardaemonic has built upon the rotted and festering foundations of their last effort "Through the Dark Pale Gravelands" and taken this new CD to the next level of dejection and misery.
The CD is darkness distilled, and I can tell you right now that you black metal freeks are gonna love this album.
Review by Jez.
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