Watain's "Lawless Darkness" a Decent NWOBHM Album

According to Watain, today is supposed to have been the day of black metal's rebirth. And although their words should not always be taken lightly, Watain are known just as much for their passion as they are for their big talk. Maybe it's all just theatrics, but nonetheless, having spent the last week listening to the band's latest offering, Lawless Darkness, this reporter finds himself skeptical that this album is a rebirth of anything other than outdated 1980's traditional metal, painted black.

Structurally, these songs are more in line with Watain's earlier work on Rabid Death's Curse and Casus Luciferi, both of which, it should be noted, are excellent black metal albums. The songs, like those of many Swedish bands, are variations on the verse-chorus idea, but each major region of the song is buffered by transitional riffing, and sometimes split in two by a longer breakdown section. While the music is very well-written, many individual riffs themselves would not sound out of place on a later Judas Priest album, and no amount of minor-key layered melody lines will change that. This is in no way a bad thing (who doesn't love Priest?), but does that really make this a black metal album?

Genre discrepancies aside, it doesn't seem like all that much creativity is present in the core of the music, many of the phrases being slightly uninspired, or just throwbacks of riffs we already heard countless times from countless, "obscure" '80's black metal bands. Watain pull many of their well-known tricks out of the bag, but there's very little innovation happening on the microcosmic scale of riff construction, which all in all adds up to a simplistic and simple-minded album. That's not to say there's nothing good here; "Hymn to Qayin" presents some hair-raising neoclassical melodic lines, and "Waters of Ain" is certainly ambitious in scale, clocking in at over fourteen minutes, making it the band's longest song by far. The band's first instrumental, "Lawless Darkness," is a highlight as it gives an idea of what this band might sound like if they weren't constrained by lengthy lyrical tracts.

Despite some good moments, the album as a whole fails to be super-interesting, so it's not out of our league here to make some superficial complaints. For one, many of the guitar solos (!) sound out place, and usually serve to destroy whatever atmosphere may have been present before they appear, and add to the traditional heavy metal nature of this album. There is even a blues break in "Wolves Curse," likely a reference to early Tiamat (actually, this album is full of easter eggs), and the end of "Waters of Ain" consists of several minutes of rock-and-roll masturbation before fading out. In terms of production, this is like a more over-the-top Sworn to the Dark. Lawless Darkness has that fresh and clean production that wants to sound ugly, but can't match that grinding, suffocating tone that complemented the band's earlier works so perfectly.

And while it's not for this writer to say that Sworn to the Dark was all bad, this album is certainly a step backward for Watain. Not only that, it's proof positive that you can have unlimited passion, but a lack of consistent musical direction almost always results in failure somewhere along the line. Watain haven't completely succumbed to rock-stardom and bland music yet, but they are certainly on their way there, and Lawless Darkness may very well be their first major stepping stone.