(Andy Synn gets deep in his cups with the new album from Spectral Wound, out Friday)
Blame it on whatever you want – the insidious influence of social media, the growing desperation of Youtube “critics” and their need to monetise their “hot takes”, or simply the seemingly endless (and futile) competition for attention in an overloaded digital world – but it definitely seems like a lot of the nuance has been bled out of our ability to engage with, and analyse, music.
The fact is that if you were to listen solely to the mass-media hype machine you might start to think that new albums come in only two forms, either “best album ever” or “total fucking garbage”, to the point where I’ve seen some of the more excessively online fans of certain bands absolutely losing their shit if a writer decides to give one of their favourites anything less than a perfect score.
There’s also an expectation – one which I find entirely unfair and thoroughly counterproductive – that a band’s new album must be “better” (which is an extremely loaded word when it comes to art in the first place) than their previous one, which ends up creating an impossible set of expectations as well as discouraging risk-taking and/or experimentation.
And the reason I’m saying all of this (which some of you may already have worked out) is because I don’t think that Songs of Blood and Mire is better than 2021’s fantastic A Diabolic Thirst… but to say it is anything less than its equal, now that would be a crime.
Perhaps even more importantly, now we’ve (hopefully) moved past trying to pit this record against its predecessor, is that Songs of Blood and Mire is very much its own beast – a little bit punkier, a little bit groovier, and possessed of a little bit more stadium-friendly swagger (something which I could already have told you after seeing the band’s commanding performance at this year’s Maryland Deathfest) – and more than capable of standing on its own cloven-hooved feet.
And while it’s likely that the band’s increased profile and popularity, coupled with their increasingly bold and bombastic (and notably non-necro) sound, will inevitably end up turning some sections of the Black Metal community against them (if they haven’t already done so), it’s not like Spectral Wound have gone and “sold out” all of a sudden – the scything blastbeats and screeching banshee-howls of antagonistic opener “Fevers and Suffering” should quickly disprove any such accusations – and more that they’ve simply decided to stop being afraid of success, or of being judged for it.
As a result there’s not an ounce of shame – or compromise – present in the driving bass lines, decadent tremolo melodies, and damnably infectious rhythms which also permeate the aforementioned “Fevers…”, nor are they afraid to wear their bloodiest, fieriest Bathory influences loud and proud during the equally thunderous “At Wine-Dark Midnight in Mouldering Halls” (whose massive “drink deep!” hook truly needs, and deserves, to be heard in equally massive halls rather than dingy basements and back-alley clubs… though it’ll probably kill there too).
It’s this marriage of both new and old – which I’ve found not dissimilar, especially during outstanding tracks like the propulsive, punky “Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal” (surely a firm contender for “Song Title of the Year”) and the leather-clad, brimstone-snorting “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit”, to their similarly era-straddling cousins in Kampfar – that Spectral Wound balance so well, in my opinion, and which marks them out not just as “future headliners”, but deserving headliners right here and right now.
Sure, when backed into a corner (or asked to write a review) I might admit that “The Horn Marauding” falls a little short of the heights of its companions, but otherwise there’s no question that these songs – culminating in the outrageously grim grooves and outlandishly heroic hooks of “A Coin Upon the Tongue” and fantastic final track “Twelve Moons in Hell” (whose mournfully melodic and gorgeously gloomy second half in particular helps end the record on the highest of highs) – are all (or almost all) of such a superior vintage that, whether it’s your first or your fourth round with the band, you’re going to want to keep coming back for just one more taste… again and again… even after promising that this time will be the last one.
But, trust me – it won’t be.