Wehrwolfe - Godless We Stand
Self-released - 2003
By Philip Whitehouse
Go to the
Wehrwolfe web site.
Anyone remember Darkmoon? The American black metal band who released the .403 Antichrist mini-CD to some acclaim a couple of years ago? Well, I do, mainly 'cos I reviewed it. But anyone else familiar to the band will recognise three of the members of this band too, since the guitarist, drummer and bassist left Darkmoon to form Wehrwolfe. The split with Jon Vesano (who plays rhythm guitar in Darkmoon and also plays bass in NIle) was an entirely amicable one, and was also fortuitous for black metal fanatics since it has left us with
two serious contenders for the black metal throne rather than one - and this most recent entry to the black metal world has entered the scene with all guns blazing.
That metaphor is more appropriate than you might think, too - Wehrwolfe are very keen on military imagery in their artwork, website biographies and lyrics - in fact, they give the impression of waging a musical (un)holy war. The lyrics are the usual, anti-Christian black metal fare (with the added twist of a militaristic/modern edge), and the music is every bit as ferocious as you might expect. In fact, the tag 'black metal' may be somewhat misleading - there's a hell of a lot of death metal and a hint of thrash about this band too. Machine-gun blastbeats dominate throughout (apart from the odd, sinister down-tempo passage), but the musical wizardry on display in the form of blistering solos and frantically-paced riffs lifts Wehrwolfe about their contemporaries. As, in fact, do the intricately written songs - Wehrwolfe aren't content to blast-beat their way through an entire album, as the Morbid Angel-tinged malevolent atmospherics and high-pitched guitar wailing of the closure to 'The Trinity Undone' show. Imagine a comfortable middle ground between Marduk and Nile, and you're close.
Standout tracks include 'Stainless Steel Lycanthropy', which features some jaw-dropping soloing followed by a stomping mid-section that is impossible not to headbang viciously to, and 'Masked Jackal', for the TV evangelist hating lyrics and the ridiculously catchy guitar riffs in the verse. In fact, there isn't a bad track on the album. The production is powerful and clean, leaving every instrument enough room in the mix to impress - which is useful when Chuck melts the fretboard with a blistering solo, Devon lets out a brief but impressive bass run as he does at several points in the album, or when the band use samples of warfare and combat machinery to add to the hate-filled atmosphere already competently channeled by Nathan's harsh but legible screams.
All in all, Wehrwolfe have unleashed one of the densest and most complete black metal releases thus far in the year. Definitely worth your time and money.
9/10
