Wake - Devouring Ruin

By Matt Hinch. Wake's previous album, Misery Rites, should have garnered the attention of anyone who hadn't been paying attention already. It was a potent blend of black metal and grinding madness. Anyone who thought new album, Devouring Ruin was going to follow the same formula would be wrong.

By Matt Hinch.

Artwork by Alexandre Goulet.

Wake's previous album, Misery Rites, should have garnered the attention of anyone who hadn't been paying attention already. It was a potent blend of black metal and grinding madness. Anyone who thought new album, Devouring Ruin was going to follow the same formula would be wrong. Sure, those key elements are present and accounted for but they've further honed their melodic touches and technicality and shifted in a more deathly direction.

Opener “Dissolve and Release” opens the listener's ears with a fairly melodic section but the hammer has to drop, right? It does with the force of a Prairie blizzard leading into “Kana Tevoro (Kania! Kania!)”. Technicality and off-kilter riffing compete with blasting drums and chest-caving vocals. As claustrophobic as it sounds the solos are quite expansive while still grounded in darkness.

Elsewhere we find demons unleashed. Fast, angry, and destructive. Vocals breaks and a slower pace rub elbows with more impact riffing. The back and forth between annihilation and lamentation feels more like reality than some bands one-vector approach. “Mouth of Abolition” features devastating deathgrind sewn together with prog touches and melody. The vocals, however, give no quarter amid the pummeling, yet there's enough emotion throughout to pull something out of you.

“Torchbearer” sees an atmosphere of doom devolve into noisy paranoia. A slow chug drags the listener through swamps of death before it rockets into black metal fury. There's really a lot more than just that as this track tops 10 minutes! Not too typical for grind! I don't think anyone has accused Wake of being typical.

“In the Lair of the Rat Kings” balances their signature grinding madness with some flourish. It's a banger though; total annihilation with some real heavy movement. It leads right into the penultimate track, “Monuments to Impiety”. More rage, more speed, more angularity, more heavy-handed groove.

Other than its runtime of over seven minutes closer “The Procession” brings together all the elements present in the previous nine tracks (save the two “noisy/arty” interludes). It encapsulates all the deathly weight, speed changes and bulging muscularity Devouring Ruin is built upon. It even feels like a conclusion (to the album). It has a climactic feel like it's rising, freed from the ground it so mercilessly pounds.

Wake are seriously making a name for themselves. Not only in the grind scene but as one of Canada's best extreme acts. With Devouring Ruin they are elevating an already top shelf game. This is a band not content to sit on their laurels and remain in a comfortable zone. They're pushing themselves and genre conventions and we are all the beneficiaries.

Wake - Misery Rites

By Matt Hinch. When I think of Calgary (Alberta, Canada) I don't think of grind. I think of oil, rodeo, and Country. But Wake is changing that perception. I first heard the quartet on a split with Rehashed back in 2013 but had forgotten

By Matt Hinch.


When I think of Calgary (Alberta, Canada) I don't think of grind. I think of oil, rodeo, and Country. But Wake is changing that perception. I first heard the quartet on a split with Rehashed back in 2013 but had forgotten about them until 2016's Sowing the Seeds of a Worthless Tomorrow. Fast forward a couple years and the “terror grind” act cement their place as a force to be reckoned with, regardless of locale, with Misery Rites.

If you can't tell by the album titles, Wake deal in personal struggles like addiction, depression, and isolation. Rather than wallow in sombre moods and depressive atmosphere they work through those demons with force. Intense, explosive force. Especially from drummer Josh Bueckert. The way he attacks the kit breeds catharsis just listening to it. From the pure force of hard strikes to the lactic acid blasting of “Rumination”, he leaves the listener anything but wanting.

“Rumination” and its follow-up “Bitter Winter” both go for the powerviolence jugular, eviscerating eardrums with no holds barred speed and power. All is dust. You can feel your atoms being torn apart and thrown into the abyss in a release of energy that just gets fed back into the machine.

Vocalist Kyle Ball does some of his best work on those tracks but throughout the album his intensity never waivers. Deathly growls, higher pitched yells and other terrifying vocal manipulations maintain a fear factor. To make matters worse (in the best way) Primitive Man's Ethan McCarthy lends his voice here and there. That's not the only Primitive Man you'll hear. When Wake slow it down they've got that same filthy weight we've come to know and love from their Coloradan friends.

Photos © John Mourlas. All rights reserved.

You may also notice Misery Rites “sounds” familiar. (Because you're already listening by now, right?) I'm not saying they are copying anyone that way. Not at all. But it does bear the sonic fingerprints of one Dave Otero. He recorded, mixed, and mastered this 27-minute adrenaline shot. He's also worked with the aforementioned Primitive Man as well as Cobalt (and Khemmis but that's a whole different ball of wax). To these ears Misery Rites kind of sounds like if Slow Forever Cobalt went full on grind with that sickening feeling you get from Primitive Man while maintaining Wake's own identity. Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

With grind such as this the violence is usually meted out in small bursts. That's mostly true here but not the 45-second premature ejaculations you get from a stereotypical powerviolence band. Wake have more stamina, pushing over two and three minutes. The shortest is 1:33. That is until you hit closer “Burial Ground”. It's over seven minutes but obviously not 1000bpm the whole time.

Something tells me Wake didn't slow tempos for the album's finale and drop “quiet” moments into a furious black metal flaying to give the listener some breathing room. No one who's made it this far into the album wants to cool down. You're not getting much of a break anyway. The iron still glows red as they hammer away at the world's collective psyche with crushing doom. Guitarists Rob LaChance and Arjun Gill lock horns and feed off each other through tremolo runs, feral chaos, and outright oppression.

Misery Rites is a lot to take in. It's full of unstoppable energy no matter the tempo and gorgeously painful tone. Unreal percussion and lung-searing vocals battle the ferocious guitars resulting in a bitterly angry record guaranteed to affect your day. The world is going to shit but at least we have something to soundtrack our misery.