WODE
Burn In Many Mirrors
20 BUCK SPIN
UK black metal brutalists wring might out of melody
It took barely a year for Wode to follow up their eponymous first album with Servants Of The Countercosmos, but that small span heralded a key stylistic shift, amplifying the guitar solos to NWOBHM-bothering virtuosity, all while retaining their core, barrelling, black metal pace. Here, that six-string athleticism has been upped once more, this time to a ridiculously thrilling degree. Each song avalanches through countless different riffs, ranging from Watainslipstream twin leads to stomp-ridden, expansive gothic ascents, all resulting in a cavalcade of stunning yet invigorating sonic maximalism. Bookenders Lunar Madness and Streams Of Rapture especially are simulatenously savage and fearlessly epic, their technicality sacrificing none of their rawness. With one cloven hoof in the brutishness of 90s UKBM and the other in the twilit melodicism of the Swedish scene, Wode are in tempestuously transcendent form.