Spectral Wound - Songs of Blood and Mire
SPECTRAL WOUND
Profound Lore Records
I’ve been struggling to describe exactly what I love so much about this Spectral Wound record. The strong reaction I have to it operates on a gut level. Hearing the caustic vocals, frost-bitten guitars, driving bass lines, and tremoring double-bass drums affects me on a deep, almost primal level. My music journalist brain wants me to make more sense of it than that, but ultimately, I think my reaction really comes down to feeling — particularly in response to texture and the Montreal black metal quintet’s sublime use of it.
When I say texture, I mean both the sonic qualities of the instruments themselves and the structural decisions that inform the resulting sounds of their interplay. Album opener "Fevers and Suffering" hits like a painful, searing wind, with a squall of feedback transforming into rough, accelerating guitars that are met with clamoring cymbals — the rush is inescapable. Vocalist Jonah Campbell screams, “Hide me from the hostile light / That does not warm but burns,” appealing to gothic or Miltonian sensibilities where light or sight may bring truth, but with it, discomfort. Hell is a place of “darkness visible,” and Spectral Wound realize that unsettling vision expertly here.
Elsewhere, the cheekily titled “Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal” explores those themes further, depicting a scene of revelry where “I saw below many devils, many damned / Leaping, carousing in fucking sin,” Campbell growls. Before “apocalypse” meant worldwide cataclysm, it referred to a kind of revelation, but here in the mire, there is no end, no ultimate truth, and so these insatiate “aristocrats” form a chorus that beckons the listener to join them in their own ignorance. But Spectral Wound resist, again characterizing these events not in agreement or assent but with an anxious disquiet.
So not only is the group taking aim at those who wish to look away from truth, it’s targeting black metal music’s own culpability in reinforcing those attitudes as well, and it’s using black metal’s own tropes and aesthetics to do it. In that sense, Songs of Blood and Mire amounts to one of the most creative and compelling statements from the genre in years.
