Album Review: Wode - Uncrossing The Keys
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
As I write this I’m sat with a four year old who resolutely refuses to go to bed, watching the smurfs. I'm also beneath a peppa pig duvet, just in case you thought a dainty shred of my metallic credentials might yet waft in the breeze. I’m not, in other words, the exact picture of the type of individual that Wode's invigorating marriage of loincloth-bedecked truer-than-thou ManOwaR-isms and swaggering Watain-esque black metal leather fetish indulgence would appeal to. This feels like music I should be kicking a balrog in the bollocks to, the type of music listened to by men who only began having sex with women because bears don’t have the stamina. Ah well; I’m hardly the most masculine type in the world anyway. So if you’re reading this Wode, I can’t hope to measure up to the galactic quantity of raw animal magnetism that you’ve dumped into this thing. But I can at least congratulate you on making a damn fine album.
In terms of musical lineage it feels every scintilla the child of the 80’s, hitting a sort of puberty with the game-changing releases of Back in Black, Wheels of Steel, and the NWOBHM. It feels as though it threw itself headfirst into denim and leather, and that all was good with the world but for one missing piece somewhere in the fathoms of it’s soul, an indefinable something that no digit, however judiciously pointed, could comfortably identify. But then it heard Bathory, and just like that, the hole was filled. The result is an unbreakable alliance between the effortless, anthemic cool of classic heavy metal and the scouring downpour of black metal. It rocks and rolls, the arrogant strut of it stealingattention immediately, bursting into the room through the goddamn wall in leather biker gear and a handlebar moustache as though the house belongs to it now and it wants to know what you’re doing in it’s home. It doesn't walk, it strides with the unvanquished confidence of one who knows he packs a solid nine inches even on a cold day.
Driving beats compel it forward with steamroller riffs as much the stalwart, hefty impregnability of Anvil as the heroic higher register fretboard histrionics of Iron Maiden on “Under Lanternlight”, whereas the boisterous locomotive of Motorhead smashes the highway flat on “Two Crossed Keys”.Bass, bulbous, pugnacious and pugilistic slams uppercuts through the mix that power tracks along. Yet the black in the oil-smoke the album belches behind it is of a darker breed. The vocal work comes wreathed in a choking, soot-bearing blackness, screams and howls echoing and cavernous. These sinister ministrations meld with a pitch edge on the melodies, “Lash of the Tyrant” suffused with them, the alternate pickedlead lines at 3:05 twin of the kind Emperor wielded to such monumental effect throughout their career. Doom, too, of the traditional variety, shows a maudlin visage from time to time in the plaintive strains of works like “Prisoner of the Moon”; I have not tested this, but I find myself somehow convinced that every time this song plays Bobby Liebling from Pentagram feels an unaccountable sense of wellness and the type of contentment that only comes from donning a truly decadent pair of slippers.
And yet, despite the indomitable, cocksure invincibility of the album, the best moment of it is when it realises that a sixth gear exists for a reason. Closing track “Dashed on the Rocks” is such a brilliant song, smashing through the paltry boundaries set before it with an irascible tag-team of blastbeats and dagger-keen blackened riffs in an uncivilised, troglodytic brawl. Because it’s so unhinged this utterly beautiful juxtaposition is formed against the aching, lachrymose melodies at 3:12, and something snapped into focus at that moment as a result. I found myself wishing that the whole release was more of a black metal album with heavy metal elements than the more egalitarian union that we’re actually working with here. And that means no matter how much I like what Wode are offering here, there’s a sneaking suspicion that out there in the streaming folds of time, space and possibility, there lives the idealised rendition of this album that I yearn forin it’s place.
It’s getting close to half ten and the four year still resists slumber, though she’s tired enough now that whatever time she's put to bed will unavoidably involve a deep, emotionally traumatising meltdown of apocalyptic significance. For now though, it’s fine. The Smurfs are still... doing whatever it is they do, i don’t know, there’s one called “Papa Smurf” and this all feels eerily similar to watching some blueberry doomsday cult go about it’s business. I’m not sure what they’re saying – my headphones are in, and the infinitely preferable sounds of Wode wrapping denim and leather around my cerebellum is sanding the edge off my frustration at spending my night bearing witness to the deeds of this little clutch of azure pillocks. I don’t know if your own situation is quite so devoid of metallic virtue as mine is presently, but whatever conditions you happen to find yourself in, be assured that Wode will only improve them.
