Second album for these remarkable Wiegedood, a Flemish band that counts among its ranks musicians in force of prominent names of the Belgian scene such as AmenRa and Oathbreaker. De Doden Hebben Het Goed II is the follow-up to the first part, released in 2015, and brings into even better focus the idea of black metal pursued by the trio, which only occasionally brings out the post metal and post hardcore drives that are part of the parent bands. In fact, the genre enjoys an interpretation at times furious and surprisingly faithful to the dictates of tradition (Ontizlling), while at other junctures to emerge are passages steeped in unhealthy darkness (the title track); of course there is that the quality is always maintained at the highest levels, because this is anything but a calligraphic interpretation of a style that many believe, wrongly, dead and buried if not on the way to extinction. De Doden Hebben Het Goed II is the black metal record that we haven’t heard in a long time, where fury, morbid power and, why not, a good dose of melody, collide head-on with the inevitable tendency, resulting from the background of the musicians, to lap the boundaries of the genre, and then return to a bed however always unstable and changing. A song like Smeekbede is the best example of how the dark matter, forged in Norway in the early nineties, can be manipulated and transformed without its basic coordinates being affected in any way. Difficult to do better today, even for those who invented black metal, because what could appear, given the premises, a simple diversion for musicians oriented to sound always extreme but with a more complex structure, is in fact a way to release more explicitly the anger that in post-hardcore is almost repressed by its leaden gait. Exactly the disc of black metal that every fan would like to hear, having said that there is little else to add.

2017 – ConSouling Sounds