The time has come for Spectral Wound.
With exemplary regularity, the Canadian band made up of Jonah (vocals, To The Cliffs, ex-Ensorcelor), Patrick (guitar, Throe, ex-Blood Sacrifice), Illusory (drums, Blood Sacrifice, Grole, Profane Order), Sam (bass/vocals, Basalt) and A.A. (guitar, Cauchemar, Metalian) end their three-year wait to unveil Songs Of Blood and Mire, their fourth album, on Profound Lore Records.
Fevers and Suffering is the first track to encase us in this web of darkness, and it doesn’t take long for the band to unleash its full power, followed by the vocalist’s piercing roar. The suffocating ambience gains momentum as the composition progresses, letting the piercing leads add their harrowing touch to the dark mass that gives way to At Wine-Dark Midnight in Mouldering Halls, where the pressure once again intensifies under the frantic riffs. The relentless flow occasionally adopts some effective Old School patterns, but the atmosphere remains unbreathable despite a brief, more soothing moment before the final conflagration that leads to Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal, where the musicians apply a more ethereal approach. The drums don’t hesitate to explode the rhythm while the screaming continues, but the pace will also be slowed down, but The Horn Marauding will once again set things alight with dynamic tones on which screaming harmonics are grafted. The sound carries us along at a steady pace before becoming hazy to make way for Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit, where the fury is once again present to serve the musicians’ ethereal message, with a rather catchy break that contrasts with the more majestic finale. A Coin Upon the Tongue keeps the band’s bright grimy touches, but the heady harmonics are also there to hypnotize us and keep us in their nets, allowing the vocalist to chill our blood. The final surge is called Twelve Moons in Hell, and it hits incredibly hard from its opening moments, but it also knows how to turn into icy waves before resuming its devastating virulence until the finale.
Spectral Wound awakens every three years, and the end of its torpor always sounds like a foretaste of the apocalypse. Songs Of Blood and Mire remains true to this icy but uncompromising Black Metal approach.
95/100