Wesenwille - III: The Great Light Above (2022)

After a quality sophomore effort last year and a reissue of their debut with some additional live material, the Dutch act Wesenwille is already firing up a third onslaught with some of their most savage material up front. The Great Light Above is another album one might fit snugly into the 'urban black metal' mold, its vibes do not holler at you from the side of a snowy mountain slope or a canopy of pines, but from the shadows of depressive cityscapes, shadowy back-streets throughout the history of strife-fraught human civilization. Musically it's just as gray as its two predecessors, and that can certainly limit the experience if you're seeking something more colorful and melodic, not that this album is void of such techniques, only that they are delivered in such a starkly desperate, dissonant armor which a nearly industrial certainty (though the music itself could not be dubbed industrial).

Atmospheric trapping abound like organs that help round the record out and give it a fuller body, but for the most part this is just savage, straightforward traditional blasting black metal which uses a lot of nuanced guitar techniques to dress up its tremolo-picked progressions that they feel bolder and richer than you're going to find off your garden-variety worship of Mayhem or Dark Funeral. There is always some direction this band is thrusting in, and when they break it up to slower, churning rhythms as in the track "Transformation", they become even more interesting and frankly, rather original. Would these components stand out as much if not placed against the scathing, bleak black metal battery? Probably not, and that's why this is yet another record which confidently gets its hooks under your skin and continues to pull until your outer layers are stripped, because it's just got the right balance between full force momentum and sparser, almost ambient segues which permit pensive escape.

If it suffers from anything, it might be a little of the redundantly dissonant black metal that we've heard so often these last 10-15 years from the wave of bands that follow the modern French masters, I mean you can tell their albums are going to go that way just by looking at the black/white artwork. It's a bit samey with their earlier efforts, sure, but looking at The Great Light Above from any sort of objective angle, it's sharp, raspy, cleanly produced, well-rendered and never lacking for effort, further cementing Wesenwille as one of the best up-and-coming genre acts on the Dutch scene, with ease.

Verdict: Win [8.25/10] 

https://wesenwille.bandcamp.com/

Wesenwille - I: Wesenwille & Live at Roadburn (2022)

I had the opportunity last year to cover this Dutch band's sophomore outing II: A Material God, and now the band's label Les Acteurs de l'Ombre Productions has done a solid with not only a reissue of their scarce debut, but also pairing it up with an additional live disc. As I had mentioned on this record's follow-up, Wesenwille approaches its black metal with a visual concept that simple reeks of bleak, urban despair and decay, one that you might think lends itself to a more industrialized or electronic instrumentation, perhaps some droning which would visually match the presentation, instead performed with a more traditionally organic approach to its genre which is complemented only by a degree of jangling, dissonant post-metal or post-hardcore augmentation.

I'll be blunt: this debut is even better than its own successor, a flurry of rapid riffing and drumming, tortured vocals that don't depend too strictly on monotonous rasping, and a great use of guitars as tools of atmosphere and not just riffing...there are spacey guitar segues with samples used as narrative, shining and beautiful guitars that would absolutely satisfy those looking for a more -gaze vibe within their black metal, and then these slews of almost hyperactive, punchy thrash riffing ("Prosopopoeia") that they'll unleash before putting the pedal to the metal for the album's peak hostility, its blasting segments dowsed with spiteful, dissonant chord series. All five of the tracks are threatening, haunting, and sometimes beautiful and I can hear easily why this album deserved to be put out there into more hands along with the second.

The Roadburn festival set takes three of the debut tracks, and two from II: A Material God, and blends them seamlessly into a devastating set, which if I'm being honest, sounds just as good if not better than the studio interpretations. There's a vividness or brightness here, especially to the vocals and guitars, which is a little different than the dimmer album versions, and yet it's all performed with razor perfection, and in fact some of the vocals, like the angsty barks in "The Churning Masses", sound even more impressive. I don't know if people in the audience there had a lot of experience with these guys in advance, but they hopefully came away with the desire to track down their stuff. This sounds so great...the bass, the details to the atmospheric guitars, even the sample stuff. Two albums might be a brief amount of time before you slam out your first live album, but in this case it's exceptionally captured, and adds nothing but value to the experience of the debut. If you like bleak, expressive black metal and haven't yet heard Wesenwille, effective without being needlessly complex, conventional only to a point where the modernism sneaks in through the cracks, this is well worth tracking down.

Verdict: Win [8.75/10]

https://www.facebook.com/Wesenwille/

Wesenwille - II: A Material God (2021)

Perhaps my expectations were thrown off as I was looking over the dim and depressive packaging for this Dutch duo's sophomore album, but I was pleasantly surprised by the neurotic, fulfilling brand of black metal that the pair get up to, with a far broader dynamic range and sense of ambition than you'd think at first glance. While they do possess some traits familiar to their outward aesthetics...streaming, melancholic melodies splashed all over the place, and a general sense of brooding oppression that hangs like an evening din to the upper atmosphere of the recording, this is very riff-based stuff with a potential to explode one moment and then grow more pensive the next, with some bleak and enveloping ambient segues that fill in the gaps between the more guitar oriented fare.

Every song on this album has something going for it, for example "Opulent Black Song" with its ambience sprouting the bleeding, ringing guitars, slower tremolo pickings and chords to spruce them all up and create this wistful soundscape that crushes into you like the realization that you just lost someone or something important. Or a tune like "A Material God" itself which goes straight on the attack with its zipping dissonant guitar-work redolent of their countrymen Dodecahedron, or perhaps France's Deathspell Omega. The two really get a balance here of more unhinged, frenzied composition and then more controlled matter with some samples or slower climbs to aggression, and it adds up to a satisfactory overall experience. The vocals have a desperate, louder rasp to them with an edge of sustained growling which fits the brightness of the eerier guitar progressions quite well, and in fact it's the same musician also performing the moody and textured guitars, as well as the some thumping bass lines which support the melodies with some needed muddle to offset their comparative sparseness.

The drums are fairly simple through a lot of the steadier moments, with nice little kick fills and grooves that contribute to the spaciousness; however, on short notice they can transform into forceful blasting and follow the schizophrenic nature of the writing. They do have a somewhat mechanical feel to them, which almost lends the album a slightly post-modern/industrial feel on the low end, and I don't envy that they have to compete off against some truly catchy riff sequences that are, at least for me, the most poignant and memorable part of the affair. In sum, this is a pretty great record that hopefully won't be lost in the deluge of basement or bedroom black metal because its reach never exceeds its grasp, and it kept me cycling back to its nutty rhythms and the fresh atmosphere it excels with even if I can't really say that it's devastatingly original. If you like your darkness bleak, manic and beautiful then this is yet another of the Les Acteurs de l'Ombre Productions stable well worth your time.

Verdict: Win [8.25/10]

https://www.facebook.com/Wesenwille/