WOE
WITHDRAWAL Review + Stream

With their third album Withdrawal, Philly-based Black Metal band WOE set about becoming one of USBMs strongest new forces. The band that started out as Chris Grigg’s one-man project became a full-fledged band with the previous Quietly, Undramatically, with all members contributing to the song-writing now. Maybe due to this fact Withdrawal is definitely WOE’s most varied output to date, with many non-BM influences enriching the heavy, melancholic sounds that gained them already quite some recognition over the last years.

One thing I always liked about WOE is that they never even tried to imitate certain trends within the realm of Black Metal: not the tree-hugging primitivism of WITTR and the likes, nor the “transcendental” aesthetics that occurred around the same time. And WOE didn’t fall back to a total Scandinavian mock-up either.

Instead WOE take the inscribed aggression and melancholy of Black Metal, boosting it with a heavy, powerful production and more or less remote influences, which they take from a quite wide range of different genres. For example, the backing-vocals in This is the end of the story definitely sound very Hardcore’ish, and the clean vocals that appear now and then could also have been borrowed from certain Post-Hardcore bands. At the same time WOE also made their homework when it comes down to classic Heavy Metal. And there are traces of Post Rock and even Pop music woven into Withdrawal.

[audio:http://staging.cvltnation.com/wp-content/audio/01 This is the End of the Story.mp3,http://staging.cvltnation.com/wp-content/audio/02 Carried by Waves to Remorseless S.mp3,http://staging.cvltnation.com/wp-content/audio/03 All Bridges Burned.mp3,http://staging.cvltnation.com/wp-content/audio/04 Ceaseless Jaws.mp3,http://staging.cvltnation.com/wp-content/audio/05 Song of My Undoing.mp3,http://staging.cvltnation.com/wp-content/audio/06 Exhausted.mp3,http://staging.cvltnation.com/wp-content/audio/07 Withdrawal.mp3|titles=WOE – Withdrawal]

Of course there are countless (Black Metal) bands that state that they’ll bring “totally new influences” to a genre, but in reality, a lot of these attempts plainly suck. More often than not it all sounds just too constrained and constructed, instead of merging the strengths of different genres to something new. Not so in WOE’s case though.

Like mentioned above, the sound of Withdrawal is really amazing: powerful and clear, but of course far away from being a deadened, polished modern Metal production. WOE always wrote good songs, but on this record they became really outstanding: Not only that you would be able to recognize a WOE riff amongst others pretty easy, also each song on Withdrawal differs from the others. All in all Withdrawal is exceptional, exciting and a definite landmark in the band’s career and the discography of USBM.

I’m quite sure that there might be some narrow minds claiming that WOE don’t even play trve Black Metal anymore, but those people probably weren’t into WOE from early on. For me, and as far as I can tell for a huge amount of other people, Withdrawal is one of the strongest Metal albums that came out so far in 2013. Surely not to be missed.

withdrawal.woeunholy.com