Watain - Rabid Death's Curse
Review: Within shuddering chromatic dirges this band deftly hide the beginnings of melodic songwriting and in the midst of the ensuing chaos subtly allow escape of memes from within unrelenting conflict between polar attitudes of the dominant motivic pair encapsulated in rhythm and tonal mean, adding ingredients to a primordial soup of fertile possibility which emerges slowly and shapes theme within the ostensible definitions of song as repeated structural components. Riffs sometimes too obvious for use become with the addition of layers of harmonization and pure melodic change, in transition and in continuity, a clustering of symbols related to the natural evocations of riff shapes.
As composition, this is the mixed medium of rock and neoclassical art and hardcore that describes most metal, yet since its method is aggressive counterpoint of abstract implication more than harmonic completion, this style allows potent narrative through its inherent approach to complexity as a product of time. Its shaping of phrase lends itself to short bursts of information becoming cumulative in retrospect while its consciousness of the balance of phrase and placement in harmony necessary for pop music conducts arrangement and tone choice around the unfettered rhythm playing of manic guitarists.
A blur of incognition, drums flicker and pummel into motivational explosions of beat and synthesis. Instrumentation is clearly competent but instruments are played roughly for the sake of sound. Where many bands of the melodic black style have interpreted it strictly in the rock tradition, Watain escape that enclosure through an aesthetic enfolding its content in the spaces unexpected for structural discourse, and from this they make from uncertain beginnings the fomented anger of the continuation of a classic black metal sound.