It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen an actual double album, but this hour and twenty-two minute double CD by French quintet Wheelfall came in a beautifully packaged digipak where the grey hues perfectly illustrate the sombre feeling contained in the music.
A steady guitar strumming has an eerie piano melody superimposed giving “I Descend into the Deep” a bit of a horror film upcoming fright feel to it before Fabien W. Furter and Florian Rambour’s guitars kick in in earnest for “Dead Eyes” along with Niko Elbow Giraud’s ponderous drums as the song lumbers from dead slow to near blast over nearly 8 minutes.
“Strangers” alternates slowly spoken lyrics with a low Gregorian Chant-like drone, all the while heavy but slow guitar riffs are drawn out on the guitars with plenty of feedback.
The pace picks up substantially on “Vanishing Point” where the sound has a hybrid Fear Factory/Sepultura feel to it with the squeals of choppy harmonic rhythms and a clipped kick drum. Fabien W. Furter’s vocals are gruff death-like roars rather than growls
Rather ambient and trippy is “Now Wakes the Sea” as it increases in pace from a gentle breeze with wind-chimes clinking to Thibaut Thieblemont tinkling away on piano in a dark forest at midnight.
“The Drift” is very doom and gloomy with its oppressive claustrophobic guitar riffs burying you in layers upon layers of reverb and distortion while FWF’s gravelly voice seems to rise up from an echoy sepulchre before its only odd sounds that manage to escape. While “Pilgrimage” has a bass driven rumble with a clean and distorted guitar melody accompaniment and slightly rough vocals without every becoming deathy but never really clean either.
Thus ends disc 1.
It’s during “Shelter” that is becomes abundantly clear that a piano is a percussive instrument as the reverberation drowns out everything, including Niko El Moche’s reverberating bass.
The very minimalist “Absence of Doubt” only has a couple notes being played on single strings of the guitar with a simple tempo tapped out on the drums and clean but rather gruff vocals being slowly sung. Just before halfway through, the notes turn into riffs with the drums being pounded as opposed to tapped and vocals belted out with a bit more fervour.
Keyboards bleed through a staticy buzz before sludgy guitars and deep roars take “Shape Shifter” on its 9 minute journey.
Most of the instrumentals on this album are rather mood enhancing ambient tracks and “A Night of Dark Trees” is no different as it conjures up images of tribal drummers in deep forests. And while there may be vocals in “The Skeptic and His Shadows” they are far from lyrics but more just guttural sounds emanating from dark haunted recesses over lumbering guitars and painfully slow drums.
The penultimate song “Sound of Salvation” opens with a guitar sounding like a foghorn that repeats in the background as a choppy guitar riff comes to the fore with a heady bass sound backing it up.
“Return Trip” ends in the way the album began, gently, but it’s the preceding 8 minutes that are probably more important as they wind their way towards the conclusion. Time is kept with beats of static until the drums finally replace them, with guitars getting heavier and slowly faster but never beyond a doom-death pace allowing the vocals to drag out lengthy roars over the blistering kick drums.
In many ways I wasn’t expecting this album to be as bleak as it was, but it certainly set the mood really well and was rather unobtrusive in doing so. It may have been rather interesting to read the novel that is meant to accompany the album because in many ways the album feels like a score where something rather ominous was taking place.
(7/10 – Marco Gaminara)
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