Despite hard times, White Ward releases its new album.
Formed in 2012 in Ukraine, the band consisting of Yuriy Kazaryan (guitar), Andrey Pechatkin (bass/vocals), Yevhenii Karamushko (drums, Schattenfall), Mykola Jack (guitar), and Dima Dudko (saxophone), the band has announced the release of False Light, its third album, through Debemur Morti Productions.
The band is accompanied by Vitaliy Havrilenko, Jay Gambit (Crowhurst) and Adam Symonds (Latitudes) on clean vocals, Jerome Burns on trumpet, Yaroslav Tovarianskyi on double bass and Mykola Lebed (Selma, Mark Tokar Trio) on piano.
The album begins with the quietness of Leviathan, which will be broken by melancholic Black Metal, then by those heartbreaking screams which come to life in this haunting rhythmic with hypnotic elements. The riffs gradually surround us by exploding, letting the saxophone find its place before the whole sound calms down to allow the instrument to express itself alone. Saturated vocals will come back to populate the saturation, accompanied by clean choruses, and the rhythmic navigates in this contrast until Salt Paradise, a very progressive track which meets a deep and mysterious voice. The track will remain very calm while being still anchored in a melodic darkness, then Phoenix returns to the disturbing tones which will bring back the saturation, while maintaining the hypnotic power of the saxophone between two extremely intense and abrasive parts. Screams are seizing and wonderfully integrated with the composition’s complexity, which will end up letting us go with Silence Circles and its intriguing dissonance. The devastating power of Post-Black meets disturbing and heavy tones, but also massive screams and softer elements, and this wave of contrast gives birth to Echoes in Eternity, a long interlude anchored in softness and Jazz influences, then in frightening tones before letting Cronus offer us some Post-Punk roots. But this wave of quietness will be broken again by the raw power of saturation, accompanied by abrasive screams, just like on False Light, the long eponymous track, of which suffocating darkness can immediately be felt. As expected, saturation will soon take over again, interspersed with this Jazz parts which will also be swallowed up in the flood of fury, but we will find a few bursts of softness which still exist before being annihilated by this massive double pedal. The final drives us to the very quiet Downfall, accompanied by a sampled voice in the background and some keyboards, then by nothingness.
For more than an hour, White Ward makes us sail between quietness, violence, darkness and light. The contrast raised by False Light is perfect, and each second of its incarnation has its own identity, forged in all the band’s influences.
95/100