Wayfarer - World's Blood

This came out way back in May, but I have been determined to catch more of the things coming through the crack this year, and you’re not getting away from me, Wayfarer. You will let me say good things about your new album, and you will like it, but probably not hear about it if we’re being real here. Who cares?

Wayfarer! Denver, Colorado! Releasing their third LP after switching over from Prosthetic Records to Profound Lore. World’s Blood! American black metal! Very American, and not in the way that cynics and decriers of Deafheaven’s brand of black metal probably immediately think of whenever the phrase “American black metal” pops up lately.

Integrating a subtle American folk influence, not nearly as theatrically as Panopticon, Wayfarer create the naturalistic atmospheric black metal that Wolves in the Throne Room have spearheaded, while adding a few calculated dashes of guitar twang and folky melody to provide an anchor in the American soil that holds the vast black metal ambiance over a specific environment.

The band open the album with the shortest track, “Animal Crown”, under five minutes. In those five minutes, Wayfarer set a meditative tone for the album while building a solid composition on blackened ambient guitar sections and spacious performances and production. Excellent start to the album. The second track, “On Horseback They Carried Thunder”, is much longer: thirteen and a half minutes, and although the song takes its time, it takes it well. The song works together ethereal, cathartic guitar leads, shoegaze-y guitar-driven sections, echo-y drums, and even death metal-inspired growls into a massive, captivating journey of sounds that both would impress both Wolves in the Throne Room and Deafheaven, for another fantastic song.

The album’s third track, “The Crows Ahead Cry War”, is a builder as well, making its way from a tom-focused drum pattern in the beginning to more fully unleashed blackgaze later on. My only complaint here is that the guitar work is not quite as varied from the previous track, and the song doesn’t really provide a tangible connection to the Western/Midwestern aesthetic the album is grounded in until the truly, deeply melancholic, ambient guitar section at the end, which could very well have ended the album on a note of somber, sorrowful meditation if the band wanted it to.

On the next song, another ten-minute epic, “The Dreaming Plain”, the band go cathartically shoegaze-y, not changing up the script too much, but still weaving together the wealth of ideas they bring to the table in such a powerful fashion. It is here, though that the band could have used something like the interludes on Sunbather to break up the homogeneity of the three massive tracks in the middle. The closing track, “A Nation of Immigrants” ends the album on a folksy, ambient acoustic semi-chant that wraps the album up nicely in a thoughtful fashion. It honestly could have made for the kind of Sunbather-like interlude I mentioned somewhere in the middle of the album. But it does work well as a bit of a cool down song.

I haven’t done this before, but I made a little custom track listing that I think provides a different, and more dynamic flow to the album. This is obviously my manipulation of the album and its pieces, which can be easily dismissed as untrue to the artists’ decision to order the songs the way they did. I’m not saying this order is better, it’s just one I have been liking to listen to the whole album in.

1.      Animal Crown

2.      The Dreaming Plain

3.      On Horseback They Carried Thunder

4.      A Nation of Immigrants

5.      The Crows Ahead Cry War

I do like “Animal Crown” as an opener, but I felt like “The Dreaming Plain” would add its own slow build to immediately juxtapose it. I also like the conclusiveness “The Crows Ahead Cry War” brings just after the calm of “A Nation of Immigrants”, and I thought the album’s biggest building block worked well in the center of it all, and with a transition song to follow it. Again, this is just an order I like too, and it’s very possible the band played around with the order of the songs and maybe even had something like this at one point, but of course they decided upon the order I addressed the tracks previously, and I assessed the album based on the flow that order conveys.

Wayfarer have made a strong contribution to a relatively quiet year for American black metal, and although it’s not really a groundbreaking album for blackgaze, it does showcase how strong the genre can be at its best, the bold emotional heights it can reach when approached with a enough musical ideas. Overall, the songs on here were all very good, if not fantastic, and I think this is one of my favorite black metal releases of the year.