Monday, February 20, 2012

album review : "consulting the bones" by WITCHDEN

The awaiting has been pretty long since last August when the band had puted on streaming  4 songs of that 1st album; it's not that I was expecting daily the 5 other songs, like my grandfather was waiting for his newspaper each morning, but a bit like with love preliminaries, after a while, you know the excitement....   Now it's fully available and it's nicely confirmed : "consulting the bones" is a killer masterpiece !!!!                                                                                    SLUDGE can be used in quite many situations, often accompanied by STONER and/or DOOM, but concerning WITCHDEN the best additional terms would be Doomed PUNK'n'ROLL and believe me that gives something pretty unique and totally blasting !!!Those 4 guys have created here a very personnal debut release with a sound that is as thick as a mammoth skin just before winter, based on  viciously doomed mid-tempos with some of the sickest   vocals you can ever expect... Jason Micah is indeed a very impressive growler, he screams like just a few can do it (Michael Williams, Dave Collins), with such anger, force and conviction that you could imagine him being tortured at the gates of hell. I think he's the most distinctive asset to the band but the musical qualities are pretty interesting too, straight and pretty easy to get into, always doomed  with throbbing rythmics and hammering drums by Jeff Moen (also actually playing in the mighty SOURVEIN).
The band doesn't look for useless refinement or blackened moods as the actual tendencies suggest. If this has an obvious Punk'n'roll edge, this doesn't mean at all we've got something repetitive or technically limited, no this is more in terms of rawness and straightness that WITCHDEN take ressources here ...
"captive man", "ossuary", "if hell awaits", "sharpsword" or "kill at will" are real hightlights  full of vicious crudeness and filthy authenticity, I'm maybe wrong but I doubt indeed that teenagers could have played with such tightness and those described caracters at the same time. I often write it after an enthusiastic review, but more than ever I would be really curious to see WITCHDEN live cause it must be something awesomely brutal... Let's hope this could happen someday aorund here in Europe, while waiting for this pleasure "consulting the bones" will be played very very regularly !




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