Wake have become an increasingly interesting concern over the years, and their sixth album represents their finest achievement yet. For ‘Thought Form Descent’ the band challenged themselves to change and evolve, reshaping their view of extremity and exploring how beauty and brutality intersect. The results are startling, frankly, and while the band might have explored post-rock shimmers and glinting melodies in the past they’ve now opened up their sound so fully it borders on the psychedelic. Grindcore and black metal elements twist violently around each other like snakes fucking, the band’s trademark blasts, venomous roars and difficult, double-jointed riffs all very much on display. Texturing it all, and often running concurrently with the savagery, however, are blissed out washes of sound that could be drawn from shoegaze or space-rock. The songs are massive, both in terms of physical geography (two merrily stretch beyond the eight-minute mark) and psychic ambition, somehow merging the monochrome starkness of extreme music’s bleaker reaches with shapeshifting whorls of pastel colour in a manner that seems both sane and essential. If you’ve a fondness for anything from Hexis, Discordance Axis and Oranssi Pazuzu to Hum and Spacemen 3 then there’s likely something here to intrigue you, and if you like the idea of all those bands smashed together to form something ugly and poisonous yet bizarrely desirable, then ‘Thought Form Descent’ is a seriously mouth-watering prospect.
