Wold

Job's Daughters

Boomkat Product Review:

Inimitable force of nature and radical black metal alchemist, Wold terrifies and thrills with an Old Testament-skooled treatise on The Book of Job, ditching guitars for a mountain dulcimer to extraordinary, rapturous effect.

‘Job’s Daughter’ is the culmination of seven years of focussed mentation energies, and acts as prologue to the next Wold. The seven-part album is their 2nd release since returning from the cold, and a streak of awesome Black Mecha releases, with ‘Rabbit Cabinet’ in 2022, adding to a remarkable run of CDr’s on the artist’s private label, Owe CD, out of their native Providence, RI, USA. It’s evidently not for the faint hearted, but those with the mettle for thee most vital sounds from beyond will be left ravished and elucidated in ways that we’ll never be able to fully explain, yet feel wholeheartedly.

It may be hard to tell from the lashings of trve, black metal-styled, overdriven recording techniques, but the music here is distinguished by Wold’s switch from guitars to the unorthodox use of a mountain dulcimer. Also known as an Appalachian dulcimer, the fretted string instrument originated with Scottish-Irish American immigrants, and here roots Wold’s music deeper in his ancestry, but not strictly beholden to it. Taken together with its purposeful track titles, the music spells out a breathtaking experience grappling with why God permits evil. Between the blistering torment of ‘Church of the Three Daughters’; the quivering rush of high register chromatic distortion to ‘She Who Acts like the Sea’; the relatively shocking, wrong-end-of-telescope vision to ‘The Smell of Worship’; and blissed howl of ‘Hunter’s Moonlit Remnant’: we are in the presence of otherworldly, life-affirming powers that should be ringing the loudest bells for any acolytes of Wold’s earliest work.

CD (7)