Manifesto of Hate

I don't hear much Welsh black metal. It's a shame, because when I do, I almost always find myself transfixed by the sheer hatred and viciousness that courses through its veins. If it was not evident from the band name and album title alone, Oldevil aims to continue this legacy.

On the songwriting front, the tracks are nothing if not minimal. Each cycles between two, maybe three riffs; each sits at about the same tempo and follow more or less the same "blast beats with crashes on the accents" pattern; each is fairly short and fairly simple. None of these things are flaws - the riffs grow stronger and stronger as the EP progresses, and I have absolutely no qualms about the pummeling "Norsecore" style. Hell, with album art that takes such clear influence from Panzer Division Marduk, I sort of expect the music to follow suit. The introductory riff in "Serpent Spawn" is one of the better riffs I've heard in that style lately, and the main riff of "Yum Kaax" isn't far behind. Even the barebones riffing in "Hammer of Fury" compelled me - it sounded blunt and vicious, just as the title would suggest.

There's nothing unique about the vocals either, but I don't really expect there to be and they are performed fairly well. Belonging to the Abbath-inspired, croaky school of BM vocals, their only real job is to sound harsh and hateful, and they succeed handily. I'm not sure I care for the production on them - they sound like they were digitally edited to suggest the sound of a tinny cassette 4-track, which doesn't gel with the somewhat more transparently modern production on the remaining instruments - but I'd much rather hear something well-performed and poorly-produced than the inverse.

If I have a real gripe, it's how these songs end. I bitch about this a lot in my reviews, but I hear it a lot and it feels worthy of criticism each time - these tracks just end. There's neither grace nor finality nor even any particular musicality to it. When the time has come for each track to end, the riff just stops - usually with one last power-chord stab on the root, at least, but with no more than that. I'd prefer to hear at least a half note rather than the eighth that we get. With the sheer density of vocals, perhaps one of these four songs could've ended with a final lyrical tag. I'd even have preferred a fadeout - something else that I loathe - to the nothing that we get. This is worst on the first track, which makes the strange choice to close with a full-speed-ahead drum fill, but none of the tracks get it right.

Still, it's ultimately a fairly minor complaint for an EP that I enjoyed quite a bit. I'm hoping we'll see a cassette or CD release come from this so I can add it to my collection, and I certainly hope to hear more music from this project in the future.