WOODS OF YPRES „Against The Seasons”

Music: Viking/Black Metal
Duration: 30:00 minutes (5 songs)


Good songs: The album should be looked at as if it were one long song, which really is a good one

This is my first review since I came back from my vacation. No air-conditioning, sun shines directly into my eyes, and I can almost eat the air in this personal incubator. In spite of this, I might catch a cold, listening to this chilling demo. If this is Woods Of Ypres' idea of a demo, my expectations on their debut are very high.

These guys are from Canada, but manage to create a very good Finnish atmosphere, as I said, this is a very cold one (like in most “true” black metal). The music moves somewhere between Viking and black metal, it possesses the sad and sorrowful melodies of Viking metal, but also the typical black vocals, raw production, and blazing, aggressive blast beats.

A strong Opeth influence can easily be detected on this album, not only because the band uses a lot of acoustic intermezzos. Many bands do this, but I rarely notice any interesting acoustic breaks, most of them are very bad, and only carry the function of being intermezzo, to split up constant aggressiveness. Most intermezzos are placed to pretend that they are played by a good band, and not to give the listener something to be excited about. In those cases, the acoustic guitar is merely a run to upcoming riff, on which the listener can bang his head. This listener thinks these breaks are annoying but necessary, to be relaxed for a while. Therefore, a normal metal fan usually doesn't like it when acoustic parts are too long, but that is not the case with good acoustic parts, like on this album. In this case, these breaks are outstanding: good melodies and a nice classic guitar sound. Sometimes this instrument is used together with solos, or the normal guitar work, which really creates interesting parts.

The vocals are not all traditional black; the vocalist also uses a clean voice. This always is a very welcome break, because his voice is very good, and the balance of clean singing and screaming is excellent. The vocalist's range is average, if I take his voice out of the black metal scene. More important is, that he sings with great ease, and his voice sounds very natural.

The band is more than just black metal, the overall is very sorrowful and cold, instead of evil, and the band has a deeper amorphis-influence, which mainly can be heard in the melodies. This may not be common for a black metal band (that's how they call themselves), and therefore I rather call this melodic black metal, or Viking/black metal.

The production is very good, considering this is a demo of an unsigned band. The band really should be proud of the sound of their drums, which is really heavy and fitting. I hope this band finds a good label to perfect their sound.

Against the seasons is created during a very hot summer and still remains a very cold record (what is not a bad thing, definitely not in this case!), and manages to set good atmospheres. The band needs some work on the variety and catchy ness of the songs though. If they can do that without loosing their brilliant atmospheres (what is possible, as Dark Fortress showed on PGC), their first full-length album would be divine.

This is a demo of outstanding quality, and would even go a very good album; I really look forward to their first full-length album.

note: 7.5/10

Tracklist

01 Intro: The Shams Of Optimism
02 Crossing The 45th Parallel
03 The Sea Of Immeasurable Loss
04 A Meeting Place And Time
05 Awaiting The Inevitable