Album Review: Wolftooth - Blood & Iron
Reviewed by Sam Jones
Wolftooth have been pretty well talked of lately having received their big break a number of years ago, they may only have formed in 2017 but Wolftooth have quickly become one of the biggest new names in modern heavy metal right now. Hailing out of Indiana, United States the band play a pretty straightforward and non-nonsense kind of heavy metal that hasn’t been seen for quite a while. Their debut and self-titled album, released back in 2018, was a massive breakthrough early on in the band’s career and people were soon turning heads which only continued into 2020 with their follow up record Valhalla. Now in the waning days of 2021 the band give us their third studio length album titled Blood & Iron in a bid to keep that train of positivity going, especially seeing as this is their first record released under the recent signing of Napalm Records. So let’s take a look at this album and see what Wolftooth have here in store for us.
For a band that got such a big and early break with their debut album, Wolftooth have a really quaint and reserved guitar performance here. I hadn’t picked up on it initially, but the guitar work has this pretty professional and esoteric sounding aesthetic whereby, the band aren’t going to break their immediate persona with some wild or ludicrous sounding soundscape. What we hear from the band is what we get. It reminds me greatly of what some stoner bands from the early 2000s explosion of such a subgenre experienced where their guitar tones were certainly oozing that style but kept to themselves the raw power, instead giving audiences something straightforward to latch onto which only heightened their attention to everything else the band could otherwise give them in a collective package.
I really liked how the vocals were handled here. Within the mix they don’t try to shout you down or make you feel small amidst a gigantic and booming performance, the vocals mirror what the songwriting itself does: it restrains itself in a way that allows your perception of the full band performance to not feel hindered in any way. I appreciated however the way the vocals had this acute echoing effect on their performance so that while the band are playing, the vocals aren’t merely coming across as something flat and dead in the air. There’s at least that slight injection of life and space into the vocals, formulating within us an idea of what scope this album possesses. It’s evident that the album has more space within its soundscape that the band don’t choose to use and therefore creates the impression that you could easily move in and around this record. This is not a record that is actively punishing your senses just for listening, the band let you sit back and relax to all they have to offer including the softly landing vocal tracks.
But that aforementioned professionalism doesn’t just apply to the guitar work or the vocals working their way throughout the record. If you listen to how the band play for you, it’s difficult to turn away from their record and designate it as anything other than a supremely-well planned and regimented effort. Listening to the various tracks really instils this idea that the band have a particularly segmented way at approach riffs and structure for their music. There’s never the idea that what they’re doing could overlap certain sections of their songwriting nor could their performance suddenly shift it into a more frantic and ferocious gear. It’s like dressing someone whose savage nature is suddenly calmed by wearing a three-piece suit; the album appears and sounds very particular and proper and quite dashing. But you could also suggest that people looking for something wilder and more unhinged may give this a miss owing to how cut and dry its structure and approach to songwriting is.
I found that, towards the conclusion of this album, the band have managed to create a rather striking record that manages to play without getting too close into your face. On the other hand however, I feel like if you’re not actively paying attention to the album at every single waking moment and inclined to appreciate what the band are outright giving you in the moment, it can actually be very easy to pass this album by without really taking in the specifics and favourable qualities that really demonstrate why Wolftooth are so hotly talked about lately. I feel like if a new fan were still unsure about their interest in Wolftooth, this record wouldn’t make all that much of an impact because the riffs may strike us with the polished and refined fervour they harness here but the impact feels muffled, minute. It’s deeply evident that the band play well and have exceedingly competent ability at playing with each other but I personally felt like this record needed just a little more bite to reinforce the bark. This record is structured and planned to an excellent degree but it’s impact feels formless, it lacks weight as if everything is where it needs to be but there’s nothing solid coming out from that cohesion. It’s like aiming exactly where you need to be only the shells fired are duds or merely bounce off what should explosively detonate upon contact.
In conclusion, this is a weird album for me as I recognise I enjoyed what Wolftooth did for me but, there isn’t anything I can tell you I’d highly remember in the days and weeks to come. The record on the whole is fantastically well planned and structured and everything is where to needs to be, the band‘s diction and competence for where they need to be and what section is coming next is to be applauded. However, from an entertainment perspective things sometimes feel too cut and dry and organised, it’s like someone has come along to a hard rock and heavy metal sound and wrapped it up within a straitjacket of some design. As much as the band are playing with an edge to their sound, that ferocity certainly feels like it’s heavily held back and the band could be giving us so much more. It’s an odd one for me. I know there are going to be people who’ll take to this but I’ve already forgotten about it. It’s a shame, I was excited for what Wolftooth would give me. But Blood & Iron, for myself personally, sounds rather wooden and sterilised.
