Band:	Thaw
Album:	Fading Backwards
Style:	Ambient noise, Experimental black metal
Release date:	October 25, 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. The Great Devourer
02. A Place Where Repetition Dwells
03. Wartenberg Wheel
04. In The Laughter And The Stride
05. Dissociate Me / Spreader Bar
06. Moral Justification Of Selfishness

Do you sometimes think that post-metal is just not noisy enough?

I'm going to assume that you don't have any idea who Thaw are. I mean, it's possible that you do, but chances are pretty low. I also had no idea who they were about ten years ago. Speaking of, allow me to set the scene.

I'm an impressionable and freshly 18 metalhead, in my last year of high school. My concert resume is very very small. Other than me and my father going to Bucharest to see Ozzy Osbourne in 2010, I had to either settle for local bands and bands that somehow ended up touring in Arad, or make my way to nearby Timisoara for a bigger concert. Note that this is me without any source of income other than what my relatives give me, having to rely on public transport, and for the first couple of times I had to make that trip, I had to have my father come with me to drive me. At this point I got to see bands like Korpiklaani, Arkona, and Finntroll in what used to be Club Daos, the most significant club that Timisoara ever had, a building that has sadly since been demolished. It's April 2015, and the next concert on the list is Behemoth. Right now it is sadly inconceivable for a band like that to ever play in Timisoara again, but I digress. I was familiar with one of the bands that would open for them, Bølzer. The other, the one that would come first, Thaw, was a complete newcomer to me.

I already listened to some experimental music, but I never got to see something of the sort live, so seeing a band that I had no expectations of play a brand of black metal that deconstructed into post and drone metal, and seeing a band play around with their amplifier feedback, using the amps as instruments themselves, and over the course of what must've been no more than half an hour, one that was followed by sets by two of the best extreme metal bands, ended up being a formative experience and my first contact with drone metal. Given my current tastes, I reckon they might be fundamentally different if not for that one night in April 2015. Given that Thaw released two more albums since, the latest being in 2017, they've since slowly escaped by short term memory, and I forgot the prospect of them being a band that exists and puts out music. Well, until now.

Fading Backwards is a pretty concise affair, being a few seconds short of the 35 minute mark, so it flies by very very fast, and that's for a sound that is more patience-testing and more fit for the longer forms of songwriting, so the package feels very succinct. And though I've initially described Thaw as a black metal band, albeit a very experimental one, the black metal element has been dialed back significantly this time around. What the sound of Fading Backwards ends up being is an avant-garde version of atmospheric sludge metal, a post-metal that is even dronier than usual, and one where there's someone credited specifically with "noise", and that ends up as a very significant element in the soundscape. The downside is that the flow of the album is quite weird at times, some of the transitions not being as smooth as I'd like them to be, and a lot of the mixing choices also ended up being surprisingly jarring. The upside is that each track has its own identity. On tracks like "A Place Where Repetition Dwells", the remaining black metal blends with the noise and the atmospheric quality of the post-metal to make something pretty close to industrial black metal. Others take a more psychedelic approach, like the Earth-ish "Wartenberg Wheel" or the sludge meets Cynic of "In the Laughter and the Stride".

I'm not sure in what regard I'd hold Fading Backwards if it wasn't for my one-night history with the band, both in terms of how I'd judge this album on its own terms, and how my tastes would've developed otherwise. I didn't expect to find as many elements of it, mostly in the sound design field, jarring, but I enjoyed a lot of the ideas it presented.