Dodecahedron - Kwintessens

By Justin C. I really liked Dodecahedron's debut album, although I found it to be a bit uneven at times. Some tracks stretched a bit too long without a tight enough focus, particularly in the first half of the album. That said, the final three tracks

By Justin C.

Cover art by M. Eikenaar.

I really liked Dodecahedron's debut album, although I found it to be a bit uneven at times. Some tracks stretched a bit too long without a tight enough focus, particularly in the first half of the album. That said, the final three tracks of that album, "View from Hverfell I-III," more than made up for any earlier dalliances and truly showed what this band could do. If you haven't listened to them, do that now. Click that link up there. I'll wait for you.

Now back to the new album, Kwintessens. I poked around on the interwebs a little to see if the band talked about the subject matter of the lyrics at all (more on that to come), but what I did find is that EVERY review you'll read will either compare them directly to Deathspell Omega or go out of its way to mention that you shouldn't make direct comparisons to Deathspell Omega. I'm going to strike the middle ground, because bands like Deathspell Omega and Krallice immediately came to mind as touch points for Dodecahedron. That said, we're talking about a familial resemblance at most. Yes, Dodecahedron make dissonant black metal their home, but you're not getting Paracletus pt. 2 or Years Past Matter revisited. If anything, I find Dodecahedron to have a lower barrier of entry than either DsO or Krallice. This is that rare album that's challenging, but that you can get close to almost immediately.

The album's main tracks give you a tour of the Dungeons & Dragons dice, or more mathematically speaking, the Platonic solids. After the tight, building "Prelude," "Tetrahedron" splatters spidery, dissonant lines all over. But before this track is done, it gives you a glimpse of what sets Dodecahedron apart. The song ends with a stomping, chugging riff that should satisfy anybody's recommended daily allowance of red-meat-and-potatoes heaviness. "Hexahedron" uses a similar bag of tricks, also to great effect. "Dodecahedron" (the song) throws another curve with a chiming, almost ethereal intro, one that persists through the song even when they blast back into fury.

I mentioned lyrics before. I was fortunate enough to get my pre-order of the CD a week early, so I had lyrics on hand. There are some striking turns of phrase here, particularly when it comes to colorful imagery. Sure, there's blackness and "ashen" faces screaming, but "Hexahedron" also gives us an "amethyst mist dissolving all figures," and "Dodecahedron" describes "liquid gold running through my veins." Of course, this is still metal, so "Icosahedron" gets evil-gear metaphoric with this summing up of existence: "During out stay between the grinding wheels of the great design our souls crushed between the teeth." The lyrics remind me a bit of Bosse de Nage in a very general stylistic sense, sometimes reading more like short stories than verse.

The fact that the running time of Kwintessens is 42 minutes compared to Dodecahedron's 53 minutes says a lot. This is a tighter album with the kind of high-concept songwriting the band showed in the "View from Hverfell" tracks I mentioned earlier. There's growth in every aspect here, and it's an energizing listen even as it tests you. I know, I know, we've already heard some b.s. about other black metal albums being "Album of the Year," and yes, it's still too damn early for that crap, but Kwintessens is the strongest contender so far in my book.

Woe - Hope Attrition

By Andy Osborn. I hold Woe in ridiculously high regard: their debut is the absolute pinnacle of USBM. Ferocious, blistering tremolos at the forefront of everything with a burning punk edge is what makes great American Black Metal, and Woe helped define the genre as a whole with that explosive introduction. The follow-ups, with a bit of stylistic wandering and occasional clean singing might

By Andy Osborn.


I hold Woe in ridiculously high regard: their debut is the absolute pinnacle of USBM. Ferocious, blistering tremolos at the forefront of everything with a burning punk edge is what makes great American Black Metal, and Woe helped define the genre as a whole with that explosive introduction. The follow-ups, with a bit of stylistic wandering and occasional clean singing might not have done much to clarify or expand their aggressive, singular sound, but now they’ve returned with a new fiery rage. It seems the lineup changes and sonic meandering are now in the past, as Hope Attrition strives to regain the same furor, suffocating anguish, and pure hatred that made the debut a classic and turned the band into a personal favorite.

The first few minutes flirt with the senses as the band rebuilds, one brick at a time, and each piece is absolutely gorgeous as it's introduced. The buzzy, razor-sharp guitars give way to the painfully devastating pummeling provided by recent recruit Lev Weinstein—undoubtedly the right-coast’s most devastating skinsman, who’s given one of his beefiest productions to date and adds a glorious heavy base to the band. His little cymbal accents and quick fills are the best in the business. Then, with an introductory shriek of “This is a failure!” it’s clear this is a group reborn with fresh passion and intensity.

Chris Grigg, Woe’s visionary, takes a cathartic but demanding approach to everything he touches as he seemingly drains his entire energy with every shout, every riff. My favorite Woe moments have always been those where it’s our main man alone with his guitar, playing his heart out and draining his lungs of everything they contain. A few of those moments are scattered throughout the album and provide some incredible sparks of tension relief.

And the whole package is utterly relentless. “A Distant Epitaph” is the only break from the chaos, a sub-minute acoustic meditation that almost feels required. The rest is a whirlwind of swirling riffs, poisonous atmosphere, and punishing rhythms. I’m not sure the band intended for their horrid creation to be enjoyed with a smile, but it’s impossible for such cathartic anger not to provide a little bit of downright fun, although the lyrics like the cover art paint a much bleaker picture.

With Woe’s new (ridiculously photogenic) lineup they’ve offered up their most fully realized, cohesive album since their debut and by far their best-sounding, courtesy of Sound Spa’s Stephen DeAcutis. The passion, filth, and pure vitriol that USBM demands is all there, and especially given the state of our world in this moment, Hope Attrition is a required listen.

[Please support Woe on their upcoming tours by ordering the album from their Bandcamp. See that buy link above? Just click it, you know you want to. Or go to the Bandcamp page itself for physical releases and awesome merch bundles]

Behexen - By The Blessing of Satan

By Andy Curtis-Brignell. The lazy man’s Behexen review goes like this: use the typical ‘raw black metal’ signifiers; talk for a paragraph or so about the so-called ‘Finnish Filth’ movement; mention Beherit; close. Essentially discussion of Behexen, or at least this period of their existence, is typified by their apparent

By Andy Curtis-Brignell.


The lazy man’s Behexen review goes like this: use the typical ‘raw black metal’ signifiers; talk for a paragraph or so about the so-called ‘Finnish Filth’ movement; mention Beherit; close. Essentially discussion of Behexen, or at least this period of their existence, is typified by their apparent ‘regressiveness’ and primitivism. That’s not what I want to talk about.

I’m consistently fascinated by liminal spaces in music, particularly when one can follow a band through their career and find points of flux - moments of uncertainty or experimentation that add a new dimension to music you are apparently familiar with. When we join the band for By the Blessing of Satan, we land squarely in the midst of one of these locus points. The band’s debut album Rituale Satanum from four years earlier, whilst a satisfying piece of work in its own right, is epitomised by a meat-and-potatoes approach to black metal, with very little beyond simple ferocity distinguishing it from the rest of the early 2000s swell of resurgent Euro-BM. This wasn’t helped by a particularly hollow and generic wind-tunnel production job that made it difficult to pinpoint the songwriting chops displayed on its followup.

By contrast, BTBOS has a thick but granular quality to its sound, conjuring visions of vast, sharp boulders rolling over and over you in the bowels of the earth, while Hoath Torog’s white-noise shrieks ceaselessly peak and crash like the waves of some awful sunless sea. Sonically the album appears to have been far more deliberately engineered to highlight the band’s growing talent in terms of dynamics, pacing and melody - because this is a truly melodic album despite its pace and ferocity.

Behexen 2014. Photos by Carmelo Española.

Whilst there are storming numbers such as the opening title track and the raging "Fist of the Satanist" where speed and intensity approaches Antaeus levels of belligerence, the real meat of the album comes in the mid paced numbers such as "Black Metal Baptism". The melodic interplay displayed on this track in particular is astonishing, with an unusually (for black metal, anyway) prominent bass guitar providing both a dense bedrock for the song and a deeply harmonious counterpoint to the yearningly overdriven guitars. "Black Metal Baptism" resonates with deeply felt emotion, which is all the more remarkable when both the title and lyrics seem to evoke a kind of black metal manifesto:

Black metal baptism opened the gates to darkness
and gave me the powers of sorcerers
The sign of black pentagram burned deep in my heart.

Arguably since the work of depressive pioneers such as Strid black metal has aesthetically been torn in two apparently opposed directions: the melancholy and the furious. The greatest acts are, in my opinion, those who can bridge the gap between the two, smelting something new and complex from an overused forge. With "Black Metal Baptism", Behexen reconcile these two concepts beautifully and crucially this is done seamlessly within the context of the album as a whole. By the Blessing of Satan has all the speed, anger and intensity of the most popular Norsecore but with a sense of pathos and depth of feeling that’s often alien to this strand of the genre. Sadly the main influence that seems to have been borrowed from this period of Behexen’s work seems to be an aping of the bands almost romantic fervour for satan-worship (count how many ‘orthodox’ black metal bands sprung up between 2004-6, Ill wait) rather than focusing on the sincere emotion that lay behind it.

After the success of this album and having become key influencers in the genre, the band would travel further down this melodic path with the followup to this album, My Soul for His Glory. Unfortunately the tradeoff seemed to be unequal hereon out, as the highs and lows of BTBOS are normalised into a more anonymous, if more harmonious, whole. By the Blessing of Satan truly then exists in a liminal space - between chaos and order, triumph and sorrow, hatred and love.