Woe unto Me ends the wait.
Formed in Belarus in 2007 and now consisting of Igor Kovalyov (vocals/keyboards), Artyom Serdyuk (guitar/vocals), Dzmitry Shchyhlinski (guitar), Ivan Skrundevskiy (bass), Olga Apisheva (keyboards) and Pavel Shmyga (drums), the band announces the release of their third album, Along the Meandering Ordeals, Reshape the Pivot of Harmony, through M-Theory Audio.
Mired Down in the Innermost Thicket, the first track, will slowly wrap us with its softness before letting darkness come to life with clean vocals, then explode with this visceral scream, followed by saturated vocals and heavy riffs. Melancholy and airy sounds intertwine, letting keyboards and clean vocals appear from time to time to fuel this sublime haunting march towards Spiral-Shaped Hopewreck, a composition injecting some more energetic and jerky elements to its suffocating basis. Slowness and cavernous growl are still part of this devastated and dark landscape, which becomes very contrasted when guitars and melodic elements come to prepare the ground for saturation, becoming more and more present before giving way to Deep Beneath the Burden, a track which will let softness be erased by deep and visceral sounds. But the band plays again on the contrast between heaviness and quietness, letting one answer to the other before leaving while remaining in the background without really disappearing to shelter the expressive vocal parts. The final part will be slightly more aggressive, especially on drums, and then Blood-Black Nothingness Stops Spinning will come to expose us its apathetic riffs and its airy melodies, sometimes tinted with this abrasive saturation. The vocal duo will appear from time to time, strengthening the heavy sounds with expressive tones, which will eventually disappear to let some steps guide us to The Great Waste of Withered Pipedreams, the last composition, which will offer majestic elements to accentuate the band’s atonal sounds. The hazy sonorities welcome ghostly screams and macabre keyboards, but also soothing clean vocals which skillfully find their place to harmonize the heady chorus before an ominous final, then silence reigns.
Along the Meandering Ordeals, Reshape the Pivot of Harmony is not just a simple title cleverly found by Woe unto Me. In addition to being the perfect acronym for a listener captivated by their Funeral Doom, it allows the band to name their riffs and intense vocal duet, while describing to us their musical landscape.
90/100