After a work of perhaps excessive dimensions such as Among The Lightened Skies The Voidness Flashed, the last full length dating back to 2017, the Belorussians Woe Unto Me return with the much more concise ep Spiral-Shaped Hopewreck. Despite the fact that this format very often corresponds to an interlocutory passage within the discography, in the case of the Minsk band it seems to be an ideal starting point after having almost completely abandoned the funeral of the beginnings and, in a broader sense, the doom as we understand it, offered in a rather oblique form in the first of the two CDs that are part of the aforementioned full length of four years ago (the second disc included a series of mainly acoustic tracks, overall good but not essential). The propensity of Artyom Serdyuk, founder and main composer of Woe Unto Me, towards a wider range of sounds was therefore quite evident but here it takes an explicit form, through a sound that in the three main tracks (the other four are short instrumental interludes) feeds first on the lesson of Katatonia and Opeth in the title track, to flow into the airy post metal of Sad And Slow and finally flow into the unexpected djent of Lethargica. On a final note, while considering with due regret the probably definitive loss to the doom cause of an excellent band, personally I was impressed by the first of the two solutions adopted, much less by the last one, which ends up trivializing a not negligible compositional talent on the altar of technique as an end in itself. As already written, the feeling is that Spiral-Shaped Hopewreck represents a sort of field test to verify which could be for Woe Unto Me the choices that bring more satisfactions: I already expressed my wishes, but it’s much more important what will decide Artyom about the path to take with his band.

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