(We present DGR’s detailed review of the new album by Canada’s Wake, which was just released on March 27th by Translation Loss Records.)

If you’ve been following the site recently you might’ve spotted the massive review collections fellow NCS writer Andy Synn has kicked out. Among the many groups covered (here) were Seattle black metal newcomers Izthmi and their disc The Arrows Of Our Ways. The Arrows Of Our Ways is a rare album, one amongst a packed genre that somehow manages to encapsulate the entirety of its current scene within its track list. The music presents a perfect snapshot of where their scene was at that exact moment — slight hints towards the future but mostly a perfect picture of the hive of activity and creativity that currently exists within their own spectrum, as if the band had shot an arrow of their own right through the center of it, as if competing in a musical archery event.

There are certain bands who have become masters at performing this specific act, adding to and molding their musical core to often reflect where the band members’ heads are at that exact moment, as well as providing the musical snapshot discussed above. If Izthmi managed to do so for their specific subset of black metal, so too have Canada’s Wake. They have become experts at providing deep musical looks into their world at the specific moments when each of their five albums has been released, including their newest album Devouring Ruin — a disc that captures much of the current crust, grind, and overall underground metal scene by adapting and molding it to their own noisy purposes, and in the process releasing an album almost twice as long as its noise- and grind-heavy predecessor Misery Rites. Continue reading »

(Here’s DGR’s review of the new album by Wake from Calgary, Alberta, Canada.)

Some albums take a while to review. On a personal note: I’ve always been the type to really want to listen to a disc a ton, really learn what each song is about, how it flows, get a general sense of what informed the disc, before writing about it.

Going from a first glance often feels like criminally short-changing bands sometimes, although by that same token the first impression can also be an immensely valuable take on things in a world where time is incredibly limited, and some — like many of our readers here, given the constant refrains about how much music we post — have limited listening time. So it doesn’t hurt to have a sense of immediacy in the delivery.

And therein lies the opposing side of the “album that takes a while to review”. You have the ones that are so up-front, so immediate, the kind that grab you by the throat and ragdoll you around the room so quickly that you can’t help but almost immediately lock-in with the group’s chosen sense of ferocity. The urgency with which the material is delivered becomes the driving force behind it.

Those album’s don’t take nearly as long, because as a listener you can recognize every aspect and every weapon deployed from moment one, and from there the experience becomes more about how a band uses them and with what amount of lethal auditory force. And that brings us to the recently released Misery Rites, by Canadian noise-heavy grinders Wake. Continue reading »