Wanderings

Reissued with three additional tracks, this album is a good depiction of loneliness and melancholy even if the influences are obvious. Yes, I Shalt Become certainly relies on Burzum for a lot of musical inspiration in a number of tracks throughout this album with "Winter Lights" being perhaps the most blatant example - it even sounds like an intro to one of the tracks on Burzum's "Filosofem" album - than the rest. The original ISB songs tend to have a repetive, almost looping structure (and this in itself can remind you of Burzum at times) and most of them are fairly short with the exception of "Winter Lights" which hits nearly 7 minutes in length. The music is raw but has a fairly clear production so that the singing comes across well even though it's very much in the background.

Speaking of singing, the vocals can actually be something remarkable to hear: yes, they are low in the mix and can be dominated by the guitars but they are very snarling and varied and on some tracks they are very tortured. On "Labyrinthine", ISB sole member S Holliman's voice is like a cross between Attila Csihar at his nuttiest and Striborg's Sin-nanna in near-Donald Duck mode. On "Thorns" the comparison with Csihar becomes more obvious as Holliman tries a near-operatic style for size and the music adopts a solemn funereal pace. Most of the music in fact isn't especially fast and as the album progresses the music gets more doomy so it seems to get slower and the singing becomes even more tortured with the occasional howl and Holliman starts getting fits of demonic growling and gargling as if he's turning into one of Satan's hordes himself.

The printed lyrics are very sparse and cryptic and songs like "Fragments", "The Funeral Rain" and "Insects" hint at far more than is actually present in the tracks and have an almost poetic haiku quality. It is not often we can say black metal lyrics are poetic!

The three bonus tracks are covers of songs by Burzum and Judas Iscariot which unintentionally show up shortcomings in ISB's own songs: the covers have very distinctive melodies and riffs that can often be repetitive but because the original artists varied them by changing key or picking out particular elements in them and emphasising those, the songs don't become a series of repeating loops, they become "repetition with variation". So it's perhaps not all that surprising that ISB seems to put more effort into these songs than into his own material: the covers are complex compared to the simple structures of the original "Wanderings" songs so of course they demand more musicianship. The singing on these covers on the other hand is about the same as on ISB's own work: very pained and snarling and sometimes on the deranged side. The Judas Iscariot song "The Heavens drop with Human Gore" is an especially long and varied song here and I wonder why Holliman at the time didn't take a few tips from this song and applied them to his own work to give it a more dynamic and flowing quality - some of the songs on "Wanderings" can seem quite stand-still even though there may be a lot going on in them.

Overall this is a likeable album although the best thing about it is Holliman's strangled vocals. The bonus tracks are perhaps not quite the welcome addition they could have been as they make the original ISB material seem insubstantial.