Abstracter
Wound Empire

A Wound Empire, grey to the sight and a story that takes you to a blackened wasteland through a hypnotic journey – all this can be deduced from reading the press sheet. There’s more information there as well, some black metal lingo show up speaking of sonic palettes, massive riffs and that sort of thing and some underground names known to those who know the genre are also namedropped in extensive numbers. That is a bit worrying for the one who just reads and haven’t yet heard the album, but it certainly could be interpreted that way. The cover artwork looks very good, and it looks interesting – like the cover of a story that is dark and exciting.

We are dealing with some sort of black metal here, music is slow and grunty – the wall of sound make it sound a bit less heavy. One could describe it as grey. The production sounds a bit dated but then again, that is common practice for bands in the black metal genre. The singer is okay for the genre but nothing special. Not much in terms of variation and not particularly heavy it is, kind of a dark story told through gloomy grey pictures. There are four tracks on this album, four long tracks that makes up a playing time of forty-five minutes.

I am not overly impressed with this album, it has many things going for it like atmospheres and those things but they do not quite get all the way. The album lacks a bit of depth and variation, it feels a bit monotonous to me. These things aside, I think the biggest issue with this album is that it lacks something for the listener to grab on to, something that breaks up the monotony a little, something clever and exciting – I think that this would have been rather interesting had there been something like that. I am not saying that it is horrible like much black metal we have been sent over the years, it is okay but a little too monotonous to really fly.

Nothing stands out on this album; it is a decent atmospheric dark metal thing that lacks the depth and variation to really stand out. They have many things going for them but not enough to be really interesting. Maybe fans of the genre, the similar bands or bands like them can find this more entertaining than I do – for me it doesn’t quite do it.

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