Band:	Wolvennest
Album:	Void
Style:	Krautrock, Atmospheric black metal
Release date:	May 2018

01. Silure
02. Ritual Lovers
03. Void
04. L'Heure Noire
05. The Gates
06. La Mort

Ah, yes, an album or a band that contains "Void" is absolutely bound to be one thing: atmospheric. And atmospheric it is! Don't even get me started on the Ouroboros and the cosmic geometry.

Wolvennest started a few years ago as a sort of offspring of Der Blutharsch And The Infinite Church Of The Leading Hand, and released their first album as a collaboration with some of their members. If any of you are familiar with Der Blutharsch, you might know what to expect from Wolvennest as well and you wouldn't be too far off. But right now, Wolvennest start to craft a bit of their own sound.

When I said that this album is atmospheric, I didn't really mean as some glacial cold Darkspace or some foresty Agalloch. A lot of Void is very dynamic and intense. It's rather atmospheric in some ritualistic and hypnotic sense - so much so that this album only really works as a complete listen despite its size; pausing it to do some chores and coming back will break the spell. A lot of it is based on the immersion it manages to achieve, hence why the repetitive nature of the music feels less like a drag and more enchanting. And since no song is shorter than 8 minutes, it needs to be enchanting.

Having to apply a tag to this album's genre is excruciating. I can't really strip it to its core since even that feels too diverse to be narrowed down to anything. Atmospheric black metal does it way too much injustice, but it's there, drenched and drowned in heavy psychedelic and post-punk and drone and dark ambient. It's like Aluk Todolo's blend of krautrock (also known as kosmische music, since kraut is kind of a derogatory term) and black metal, mixed with the evil post-punk of Emptiness's Not For Music, the mountain-leveling choirs and guitars of Bong and the hypnotic clean vocals-led black metal of Urfaust. And all these still don't encapsulate all the sounds on Void. I might have to add some Tangerine Dream and some The Cure and some Dead Can Dance as well.

Most of the songs don't have that much variation in structure, as in the same motif that they start with, they end with. This is mainly due to the utilization of guitar loops throughout. But the layering and the slow building of the songs make the repetitive nature of the motifs engaging. And while all songs more or less follow the same formula, they are so stylistically diverse that it doesn't feel lazy. The vocals also only arrive by the second song, at which point you probably didn't expect them to arrive. They range from the ritualistic chants to the romantic French to the gothic post-punk and some sporadic harsher ones, but the almost exclusive use of clean vocals in a mostly extreme metal album does give this album a lot of personality and creativity. And there's so much good to say about this album that I almost forgot that there's a Twin Peaks sample in there too.

Void manages to be so stylistically diverse while not being all over the place, to craft an atmosphere that is hypnotic and immersive and to be almost 70 minutes long without feeling like it lasts too much. So step inside.