Album Review: Voidwards - Bagulnik
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
What would be worse: wandering lost in the frigid waste of night-swallowed deep forest and realising that you were completely alone, or realising that you weren’t?
Voidwards are heavy. Maybe that doesn’t tell you much. This is metal after all, most bands are heavy. But there’s a gravity to Voidward’s music, a dense physicality to it. It feels enormous, encompassing, oppressive. Something alien and hostile lurks within it, monstrous and inimical to mankind. The soundscape echoes out into the cold spaces within a sea of trees, casting shadows onto the blackness itself. Who knows what stalks out here? Just because you cannot see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Waves of distortion sway, crawling ululations heralding the unknowable into being. The tension is unbearable, but there is no respite from it. Distant feedback and discordance; muffled percussion like footfalls somewhere in the endless shade. With only fleeting snatches of branches and bark emerging through endless dark to draw from, the minds eye paints devils into the periphery of your vision. Vague semblances of melodies coalesce within this caliginous soundscape before vanishing. The threat is absolute and pure. You do not belong here.
Bagulnik is harrowing. It’s existence feels wrong. As much ambience as anything else, it feels as though it lurks, predatory and hateful, at the fringes of your perception. Something ancient and apocalyptic made manifest, deathly and malign. To look upon it’s true form would be to have your mind shatter, you would claw your eyes from their sockets to be spared it’s gaze. It’s less a collection of riffs or movements and more a soundscape born of droning distortion and ungodly samples that flow and twist around each other, utterly aphotic and bereft of anything welcoming or wholesome. It flows, ascending and descending, impossibly heavy at all moments. Occasionally a simplistic drum fill will snap you out of the trance; I find these moments somewhat piercing, too humanistic to fit within the rest of the work. They remind me that this horror is ultimately the craft of flesh and blood, men with minds and motives recognisable to us, opposed to the unearthly works of hidden hands grinding and clasping away in realms man was never meant to walk within.
But I can forgive a momentary few missteps. Bagulnik overall is a frightful, uncomfortable, yet deeply atmospheric entity that deserves your time. It’s drone, and therefore definitively not for everyone, but I really enjoyed my time with Bagulnik and the unhallowed vistas it painted for me. It’s dark, unhealthy, and demands time and patience, but pays dividends when given that space to breathe, allowing the ringing distortion to bury you alive. It’s a great way to cap off the year if you find yourself unmoved by the infestation of festivities we are all subjected to around this time of year, so if you find yourself yearning for a more depressive December and you can handle the slowest of slow genres, pick up Bagulnik. You won’t regret it.
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