Starvation

Wormwood is an American band that's been around since 1997. They debuted in 2000 and Starvation is the band's second album.

The album opens with Passage of Lesser Light which starts off sounding a bit like My Dying Bride till suddenly there's a big man bawling competition and the band take off into Neurosis inspired territory. The song works well and things are off to an interesting start. Release From Expectation uses female vocals (that sort of remind me of Ihreal from Pecattum) along with a dark post metal sound to good effect before ending in an almost doom death style. This is pretty interesting stuff and the sound is somehow wide open where every instrument can be heard clearly in all it's sparse splendor.

The band sound quite unique through the album. There are parts here that sound like everything from Neurosis to Arcturus to My Dying Bride and Pecattum. While I say unique, on Starvation it doesn't always work. While the opening salvo of Passage.. and Release.. works really well, the album has a tendency to become background music as the band every now and then just fucks around in the hope of building atmosphere. Also, the post metal parts work way better than the whole doom thing. The band sounds dark and disturbed when they're bellowing out their Neurosis worship but the doom bits seem a little uninspired in comparison.

Then there's As You Bind, So You Are Bound. It starts with a long rather pointless drum and keyboard with spoken word bit before exploding into a brief second of sludge and then goes off into some incredible grating female vocals over some piss poor doom metal. The song is one of three that are over ten minutes long and that's where the problem lies with Starvation. The longer the songs are the more cut and paste it seems. There's no actual interplay here. There's a minute of post metal followed by a minute and a half of doom and vice versa. There are also too many soft meandering parts in the songs that are probably there to build atmosphere but do nothing of the sort.

Still, this isn't all bad. There are good parts in almost all the songs but you have to wade through lots of muck to get there. Also, the female vocals get really irritating after a while. Considering the paucity of information on this band I'm tempted to consider the idea that it is Ihreal from Pecattum singing on this album. The vocals are as fucking annoying.

Now, you, dear reader may have realised that my enthusiasm for this album has waned considerably during the course of this review and I'll tell you why. This style gets old really quickly and there's too many bloody annoying atmospheric parts to really get into this album. It's a difficult listen and halfway between my 5th listen in about a week I couldn't care less.

Now that I've got that out of my system, let me say that Wormwood, after a reasonably thorough inspection are one those bands that'll sound damn impressive when you listen to just a song or two, but if you happen to sit through the whole damn album they'll end up annoying the fuck out of you.