If you’re going to talk about Wold, you’re probably not going to speak of melodies. For more than a decade, the deliberately enigmatic, incredibly abrasive project has cloaked black metal beats and screams and maniacal guitar playing in a dynamic web of harsh noise and electronic contortion. At first, the result might sound slipshod and spontaneous, the result of an anti-production that captures performances of proper, discrete songs and turns them into messy, unidentifiable jumbles. But Wold’s best work is the product of fastidious and hostile arrangement, where those layers of song and manipulation move in forever-unsettled patterns. Finding the tune or even the rhyme and reason within a Wold cut suggests watching a ghost emerge from the fog: The eyes strain against an inscrutable background and slowly spot unexpected shapes, while the brain constantly second-guesses the detective work. It’s this daunting game—and Wold’s power over it—that makes the project’s albums so compelling, not the refrains.
But the centerpiece of Postsocial, Wold’s seventh album and second since the act relocated from Saskatchewan to Rhode Island, is actually an identifiable hook. Surrounded on all sides by chirping and choking noise near the start of “Five Points,” Wold leader Fortress Crookedjaw shouts the title itself 10 times (or rather, in two sets of five times, he might prefer). In the willfully obscure world of Wold, it is an absolutely lucid proclamation, decipherable even without the aid of a lyric sheet. During the next 10 minutes, Wold pushes ahead with usual ferocity. A thrashing guitar riff fights against the blanket of static beneath it, and Crookedjaw’s increasingly beleaguered bleat soon battles them both. The tumult rises so that, by the six-minute mark, his words have become mostly indecipherable ruminations on and symbolic explorations of Masonic structures, an extension of the content from their 2012 masterpiece Freermasonry. But when Crookedjaw returns to the refrain, he again powers through the melee with two more sets of five proclamations—“Five points/five points…”—after the song’s verses. He peaks above his own machine’s power. Yes, “Five Points” is a squall of explosive sound and sustained noise, but it’s also a song with a perceptible chorus-verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, so long as you’re willing to peer through the fog to find it.
“Five Points” might sound like a pretty wretched formula for a pop tune—bury everything until all that remains is some phantom of a refrain—but in all of Wold’s output, it is perhaps the clearest illustration of the finesse that empties into this incorrigible belligerence. In fact, the bulk of Postsocial pulls back the electrostatic drapes a bit more than its predecessors, allowing the cores beneath the clamor to resonate a bit more readily. Opener “Throwing Star,” for instance, suggests a violent hardcore romp played by a boombox that’s been sealed inside a plastic barrel and tossed down a metallic staircase. But get past the bedlam, and listen to the levels shift. “Throwing Star” feels alternately like a no-low-end void and, in spots, like a recording session where the only fully functional microphone was attached to the bass amplifier.
Such amoeboid acoustics are Wold’s best trick. “Spiral Star Inversion” might seem to follow a less-identifiable path, as there are no rhythms underpinning it and no refrains anchoring it; instead, Crookedjaw divides five stanzas of a prurient poem about ghoulish copulation across 14 minutes, making it the longest piece in Wold’s oeuvre. It straddles the divide between being brutal and beautiful, and the latter word is rarely associated with Wold. It’s still unforgiving music, laced with electronic samples that suggest metal scraped and stabbed against metal and crackling with a static that seems to come from a cesspool of Rice Krispies wired with contact microphones (think the Dead C at their most vile) but a gigantic two-tone pulse lingers just beneath the mess, glowing like the more radiant music of Tim Hecker. The track is a wonderland of control, a series of musical mirages nested inside one another, testing the borders between punishment and relaxation.
With Wold, all of these qualities or components—beauty, hooks, refrains, rhythms—are necessarily relative. Though moments on both Freermasonry and Postsocial offer more points of entry into their cloaked, claustrophobic universe than previous records, Wold remains some of the moment’s most brittle and confrontational fare. And there’s an absurdist foundation beneath it all, of course, with interpretations of secret Masonic rites hurled against a barely buttressed oblivion by someone who calls himself Fortress Crookedjaw. Not unlike those Masons, though, there is endless intrigue just past the surface, as Wold continues to raise more questions than their music would ever dare to answer. Even when the hook stands out against the din, as it does at the middle of Postsocial, Wold delivers a disorienting mix of power and poise, thickly veiled and wonderfully bewildering.
