Wilderun signs with Season of Mist for its fourth album.
Since 2008, the band led by Evan Anderson Berry (vocals/guitar/keyboards), Daniel Müller (bass, Hammered dulcimer), Jonathan Teachey (drums) and Wayne Ingram (guitar) offers a melting between Folk, Prog and Symphonic Metal, which continues with Epigone.
The band opens us the gates of its universe with the soft Exhaler, a very quiet composition which step by step places its elements. Melancholic riffs and clean vocals slowly progress until they lead us to Woolgatherer, a long mysterious composition which suddenly explodes to unveil us its melodic and majestic roots. The haunting sound offers very airy elements which will once more appease saturation before spawning it again to make it accompanied by impressive howlings and fast-paced blast, creating an abyss with quieter elements. But those two shades properly complete themselves, and the song enhances the contrast before Passenger comes next, guided by complexity and epic elements. Clean vocals create a bridge between the shades of this ambiances with many leads, but the band is also helped by some backing vocals and a somehow supernatural energy, then Identifier makes us sink again into quietness before allowing motivating and epic riffs to act. Complexity is once again in the middle of the composition, which makes us progress into all its influences while feeding its riffs, but the band eventually allows us to breathe with Ambition, a quite “short” track which depicts a mysterious anxiety. Noises cease to let place to the three parts of the song Distraction, which will make us successively pass through a majestic ambience with epic and sometimes weighing sonorities, a mood of progressive oppression which picks into other styles to feed its blackness, then a heady and very luminous and very luminous final. Each of the three songs has its own identity, and linking them makes them a perfect trilogy which deserves all our attention before Distraction Nulla comes to close the album. Whether softness reigns supreme on the first part of this song, rage and dissonance happen into the chaotic rhythmic before letting us wander into terror.
Wilderun’s universe is permanently fed by a contrast into intense softness and raw strength. With Epigone, complexity and Prog tones are exploited to their best, whether it is in one or another of the band’s two bases.
75/100