Wolvhammer are a crusty black metal hybrid out of Olympia, Washington who have a knack for retaining momentum between releases. Their 2018 album The Monuments of Ash & Bone was their hotly anticipated follow-up to 2014's critically acclaimed Clawing into Black Sun.
On Monuments of Ash & Bone there aren't many surprises from the band (a good thing, frankly!), which sees them continue to revel in the sludgy primitive crust punk and suffocating claustrophobic black metal that has earned them the allegiance of many a malcontent over the past decade. I was most familiar with Wolvhammer through their 2011 album The Obsidian Plains, but after hearing The Monuments of Ash & Bone it quickly became my favorite of their catalog.
The production here is much more dynamic than on their previous releases, and while that isn't always a selling point for a black metal album, it really works here. I feel like I can walk into a lot of these mixes and they will actually expand and extend into space under my tread. They feel like the precarious, geometrically unsound halls of a collapsing Victorian manner that is slowly being subsumed by the ectoplasm-rich marshy soil and clay upon which it was ill-advisedly raised.
I'm also a fan of how elemental the force and chaos of the record is. As if the band were simply a demonic wind, for which you are neither obstacle nor audience to its passage, but rather an inconsequential facet of the environment that it will batter and leave ruined in its wake. It is a kind of violence that is pure, impersonal, and uncomplicated- and I very much appreciate it.
There aren't as many moments of ambient discord on this release as their past efforts, which may disappoint some fans. Not me, for the record. Every black metal band who dropped an album between 2014 and 2018 seemed to include at least one tacked-on interlude of shifting feedback, like they were hoping you would mistake them for Deafheaven for something. Wolvhammer did a little bit of this as well, but you can definitely feel them weening themselves off such bad habits with this release.
Really the only moment on this album that doesn't feel like it is passing through you like a hot piece of steel is "Call Me Death" which includes a divergence into clean singing- a reservoir of replenishment that helps to emphasize the vibrant spectrum of brutality which the clawing, reptilian vocals occupy thereafter.
The rest of Monuments of Ash & Bonejust feels like boxing with a werewolf. I hope you've had all your shots because this bastard bites!
