WIEGEDOOD: There's Always Blood At The End Of The Road (BLACK METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Now that the "De Doden Hebben Het Goed" trilogy is over, we wondered what direction Wiegedood would decide to take. Would they continue to sculpt this icy black metal with torrential compositions? Or would they begin a brutal change? If it has been a little long in coming (four years of waiting or almost), it is not sure that the answer to this question is to everyone's taste.

The shock or even the trauma may well accompany the discovery of "There's Always Blood At The End Of The Road" as it comes out at a hundred miles an hour and without any preliminaries, a rumbling and lightning mass capable of swallowing any trace of life and light in its wake. If the Belgians were always violent cold and abrasive, they have never gone so far in the radicality. So much so that many will perhaps no longer recognize them. We have to admit that we don't get over a 'FN SCAR 16' that immediately explodes the brain of the one who has the imprudence to listen to it serenely without having taken precautions. For it is quite simple, during four minutes, the trio executes a full-scale pounding, a wild degassing of an oil slick that takes everything away without ever stopping.

If at least Wiegedood would rest - and us with it - afterwards, but no, what follows is carved in the same mineral fury bubbling with hatred. That being said, the fact that the band has abandoned long tracks (with the exception of 'Now Will Always Be', the only one to break the five-minute barrier) already announced a more direct album than its predecessors, without promising such a severity that reminds us of the one from Hate Horest with "Sorrow" (2004), a milestone of the most hateful black metal with which it shares an identical aggressiveness that nothing can stop.

Therefore, it would be easy to say that Wiegedood has negotiated a drastic change of style, but the careful listening of this fourth effort nuances this judgment. There is still something of that emotional coldness, of that austere beauty, lurking in the intimacy of "Do Doden Hebben Het Goed". The eight minutes of 'Now Will Always Be' are of course the demonstration of this, a timid lull in which the vicious tempo is combined with an inexorable despair. But in truth, each track reveals a fragility, flaws from which flows a pregnant melancholy as well as a form of painful emotion, whether it is 'Theft And Begging', 'And In Old Salamano's Room, The Dog Whimpered Softly' or 'Until It Is Not', all of which are sheared by these guitars full of desolation, ploughing the flesh like a rusty scalpel.

All in all, Wiegedood gives birth to a work of a rare intensity whose demented brutality actually masks a twilight distress. - Official website

WIEGEDOOD

THERE'S ALWAYS BLOOD AT THE END OF THE ROAD

CENTURY MEDIA RECORDS

BLACK METAL