HEXVESSEL: Polar Veil (OTHERS): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Global warming doesn't exist for Hexvessel, whose new offering truly lives up to its name. The successor to "Kindred" (2020) is so cold that it would freeze a caribou in place. Like its magnificent visuals, "Polar Veil" evokes images of villages frozen in winter, of shivering desolation, but also of boreal poetry as unique as it is fascinating.

While global warming may not exist for the Finns, climate change is very real, as their music has abruptly changed since we left them. Certainly, the band has never stagnated, and has constantly evolved over its almost fifteen-year career, without ever quite deserting the land of a psychedelic folk, sometimes experimental, often progressive. Compared to its predecessors, this sixth album is a frank mutation that plunges it into darkness.

The new ice age that has descended upon the band is accompanied by a clear hardening of both the lines and the overall mood. Hexvessel have swapped the shamanic, woodland psychedelia to which they have remained faithful since their debut for an astonishing black doom. The furious blizzard that propels 'Eternel Meadow', for example, comes as a surprise from the Scandinavians, who are almost unrecognizable. Of course, for Mathew "Kvohst" McNerney, the legendary former singer of Dødheimsgard, this shift towards black art is not all that incongruous, but we thought he was no longer interested in this dark expression.

And yet, "Polar Veil" is not a black metal record in the strict sense of the word. It exudes nocturnal melancholy and frozen darkness, the guitars have that typical sizzling grain ('Listen To The River') and certain accelerations and blasts ('Homeward Polar Spirit') would not be out of place on an album of this genre, but the singer's powerfully dramatic clear voice prevents these compositions from crossing the cold Rubicon. More theatrical than ever, his vocals are sometimes reminiscent of those of the cult Albert Witchfinder (Reverend Bizarre), as illustrated by 'The Tundra Is Awake', numbed by a depression as haunting as it is wintry. In fact, rather than pure black metal, this opus borrows its tragic, polar essence from doom, preventing the band's music from losing its bewitching beauty.

More accessible, Hexvessel remains a unique poet, a painter of majestic northernness. By leaving the northern forests, he captures the mysterious atmosphere of these regions of the Arctic Circle, a prisoner of the pack ice and eternal night, and has lost none of his bewitching, sensitive personality. - Official website

HEXVESSEL

POLAR VEIL

SVART RECORDS

OTHERS