Woe enters a new phase in its existence.
Three years after releasing its fifth album, Legacies of Frailty, Chris Grigg (vocals/guitar/bass/drums/keyboards) reinvents it with the help of Matt Mewton (guitar, Belus, Glorious Depravity), John McKinney (bass, Glorious Depravity) and Mike “Megaton” Kadnar (drums, Downfall of Gaia, So Hideous). Welcome to Legacies of Human Frailty.
Scavenger Prophets immediately plunges us back into this flood of striking coldness, complemented by Chris‘ visceral screams, instantly annihilating any attempt to resist this heady assault. The harmonics take possession of our minds, battered by the rhythm, becoming more insistent as the vocals diversify, allowing the break to give us a moment of respite before joining The Justice of Gnashing Teeth, which quickly develops a more dissonant atmosphere. Made up of bursts and accelerations, the composition also offers us more majestic keyboard passages, but also waves of dark rage that are barely veiled by the more digestible central passage, reigniting the fire to intensify the riffs before giving way to Fresh Chaos Greets the Dawn. The track was originally the first on the album, and we find the same enveloping keyboards that rise slowly but are swept away by the surrounding darkness, even more present than on the original track, ensuring continuity with the previous track before confronting us with the brutality of Distant Epitaphs. This composition is much more abrasive, much more oppressive, while retaining the dissonant elements of the previous tracks and the obvious fury in the vocals, even adding some aggressive Old School patterns before a break on Shores of Extinction, which starts much more slowly, but with the same unhealthy atmosphere. The change I noticed on the original track seems to come more naturally, once again relying on intoxicating harmonics to distill its palpable nostalgia before giving way to the last track, Far Beyond the Fracture of the Sky, which kicks off with a veritable wave of aggression combined with an almost chaotic touch, seeming to bubble up from everywhere at once, and granting us only a brief respite with a keyboard passage before bursting into flames one last time.
If Legacies of Frailty was already an excellent album, Legacies of Human Frailty has an even more visceral, more natural feel to it. Woe has understood this over time and was right to devote himself to the exercise of rearrangement, both for live performances and to mark his new identity.
95/100
Interview coming soon.