There’s a sense of urgency that pervades Woe’s new album Withdrawal, the kind of urgency you might feel if an arsonist threw a gasoline bomb through your bedroom window at 3 a.m. Which is to say, it’s scorching, and it delivers the kind of adrenaline rush triggered by the fear of being burned alive. Speaking of being burned alive, Chris Grigg shrieks his way through the album as if that’s what was happening to him, crying out in astonishing pain or rage, or maybe both, his vocal chords seared by emotion until surely they reached the limits of their endurance by the time recording ended.

I don’t know about you, but I’m perfectly happy listening to music that sounds like it’s been fueled by an accelerant. The cathartic effect of hailstorm riffs and blasting drums coupled with barely human screams is a pearl of great price, even when I remember nothing of the experience after the fire has been extinguished. But if that’s all Withdrawal offered, it wouldn’t be one of the best black metal albums of the year — and it is.

Even on the first listen to the first song, it began to dawn on me that there would be surprises in store on Withdrawal. I began to anticipate them in each song, and I wasn’t disappointed. In both small and large ways, the music pushes beyond the boundaries of conventional black metal (and yes, by now what was once revolutionary has become conventional), warping the form into something not merely cathartic but also fascinating, and ultimately quite memorable. Continue reading »