Craft was quiet for quite a while before this. Granted, they've been quiet since as well, but at least there is a precedent for it now. After drummer and founding member Daniel Halen quit in 2005, the band briefly considered breaking up, with the ultimate fate of the group remaining unclear even after 2011's Void, where Dirge Rep of Enslaved filled in behind the kit. White Noise & Black Metal was Craft's first album in seven years, heralding their triumphant return to a Darkthrone-devoted cleave of severely sharp and acerbically aggressive black metal, an invigorating blast of arctic misanthropy and cosmic angst that exhumes the genre's simple, bleak, and world-wearing forecast for humanity and serves as bait for the rotten, scale-shedding eels that squirm in writhing heaps below the surface tension of the soul- carving up the frost-fortified ramparts into intricate etches and runic arcs, a tormented intercourse of vesica piscis through which dark auras pulse and old grudges flow to attain a ripe bloody luster. WN&BM is a cleaner-produced album than its predecessor, the platework here acquiring the polish of an unnatural and sickly shade of silver- in spite of this turn towards refined, translucent shades of mayhem, there is a surprising live-recording quality to these tracks, making it possible to imagine yourself in a dungeon-like practice space submerged beneath a barn in the Swedish rurals, petrified and dragging oneself across the floor as these riff revenants raise a sigil-scrawled, phantasmal citadal of white-burning annihilation from the blackening earth of a cellar floor with the adumbral iridescence of their sinister symphony, the gust from their amplifiers coursing cold down your collar like the breath of a sky-swallowing wolf, and the thump of their grooves reverberating through your chest like a hammer striking iron. Honestly, I had a lot of fun with this release when it came out in 2018, not just because it rules in an ontological sorta way, but because at the time I was working with an incredibly annoying washed-up hipster who dropped out of New York to settle in Chicago as a sort of "Plan B" and settlement with his own ambitions. He was the kind of guy who "liked a little bit of everything," so long as "everything" was something approved by that month's flavor of byline-boasting shitshovelers, more commonly known to the public as "tastemakers." We were in a shared workspace, and I knew I could always throw it on to piss him off, especially when he suggested that we listen to something like Deafheaven or the like. It is ingrained in my lobes how this record never failed to carve a grimace across his perpetual five-o'clock shadow, deep enough to threaten to crack his gaunt, frail jawline intwine. I learned then that Craft is capable of casting a dark cloud over all of the right kind of people, and for that, they will always have my respect.
The Season of Spite (Mist) is upon you!
