Canadian black metal / noise duo Wold’s second demo has been reissued by Crucial Blast to coincide with their new album on the Profound Lore label. Since it was originally a limited cassette release, listening to this on CD almost feels as if one were hearing something forbidden, locked away in secret dusty vaults beneath Aleister Crowley’s unpublished scribblings.—The music itself amplifies that effect.
There have been all sorts of unusual sounds coming out of the Canadian black metal scene, and they’re been mostly overlooked by the rest of the world: take the dense, demented gurglings of Antediluvian, or the wintry pre-Colombian aesthetic of Gyibaaw. While Wold is no exception, what sets them apart isn’t that their sound is unusual; it sounds vaguely like your run-of-the-mill Darkthrone worship at first, but filtered through endless layers of putrid, filthy noise.
After your brain finally processes the sickening, evil screams and distortion, you realize that holy shit, there are no drums! You can discern some vague sputterings of fuzzed-out explosions, but the momentum provided by the noise is hardly rhythmic in nature. The ebb of infernal droning noise builds into some hideous swarms of darkness, essentially reducing black metal to its absolute rawest, most primal core. The press sheet for this describes the overblown fuzz as “Merzbowian” but I humbly disagree—this is taking the occult, violent madness of lo-fi underground acts such as Mutiilation or Bone Awl to the furthest conceivable extreme. Maybe we weren’t meant to hear this bleak subterranean chaos, but I think Crucial Blast has done well to reissue this release, just in case there are any more intrepid souls out there worthy of enduring its unholy destructive power.
