Labels: Season Of Mist
Review by: Alex Deller
Had it in mind that this was going to be some sort of hipster sludge thing, but there’s way more at play than mindless chuntering and the album’s all the stronger for it. Take the opening track, for instance: it sounds almost like a beefed-up Khayembii Communique intro stretched out over the course of one long song. Elsewhere, I am often reminded of the crushing dissonance of Will Haven, as though Black Sheep Wall have taken the weirdest moment in a track like ‘I’ve Seen My Fate’ and used it as their very first building block. Sure, at times you can trace the lineage and connect dots that might take you back to ‘mere’ sludge or post-metal, but amid the lung-scraped vocals and thundering riffs there’s always something else going on that’s just beyond the edge of one’s grasp: a wavering oddness like heat distorting what you think you can see out on the horizon. Much like the incongruous link between the album title and its friendly, fuzzy artwork it’s this disconnect between the expected and the actual that’ll keep on pulling you back, because despite the endless pain and misery of it all there’s definitely something worth unlocking here.