Imagining Watain as one of the most popular heavy metal bands in the world feels surprisingly easy: During the last decade, they’ve stretched and sculpted what was once primitive black metal bluster, moving from a mess of mimesis at the start of their career to, with their last two records, an invigorated update of an old and infamous sound. Sworn to the Dark, their 2007 transcontinental breakthrough, was grim and mean-- and really, really fun. With blast beats and dashing riffs that felt strangely ecstatic, Sworn to the Dark was an alternative universe hit parade. Its follow-up, 2010’s Lawless Darkness, proved that Watain could reanimate those feelings while studding the blitzes with unlikely new elements-- solos that spun out like Hawkwind, doom impasses that created new centers of gravity, symphonic moments that nodded back toward prog. Like America’s Nachtmystium, these Swedes could extract and expand upon their initial fury and potentially pick up a lot of new listeners in the process. And they invoke an intriguing element of danger, too, with their deadpan Satanic proselytizing, their ornate and inflammatory stage show, and their controversy-stoking past. Watain could be their own heavy metal parking lot scene, with kids ready to run to the devil inside the arena and concerned parents ready to picket and protest outside.
The Wild Hunt, Watain’s first album in three years, won’t quell any such fantasies concerning their could-be ascendance, at least for a bit. In fact, the first side of this 11-track, hour-long album brims with the sort of magnetism that first suggested this band for popularity over so many of their peers. “All That May Bleed” is a set of stops and stomps, with an introduction that begs for fists to be pumped and a rhythm section that sends every verse and chorus into a frenzy. And just ahead of a dervish guitar solo, frontman and provocateur Erik Danielsson yells “The salt of Satan in the wounds-- of Christ!,” hanging out the sort of Slayer-shaped totem that a few thousand fans might happily yell back at him. And “The Child Must Die” suggests an unholy trinity of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Bathory. Danielsson broadcasts his mortal invective over a stubborn rock’n’roll march, with the blast beats smartly reserved to enliven the breaks between the verses and the space behind the solos. Following the steady instrumental build that opens the album, The Wild Hunt rushes ahead as a hyperbolic, overdriven onslaught, using black metal as bait rather than barrier.
But more than three years have passed since the release of Lawless Darkness, a good chunk of which Watain spent writing and recording The Wild Hunt. The band built the songs for six months and recorded them for four more months in four different studios. Unfortunately, the work shows not in a string of 10 breathless Watain bruisers but instead in a series of tracks that force the band far from its onyx comfort zone. While Watain has often folded alien elements into their black metal, The Wild Hunt tries to fold black metal, or at least its essence, back into those other influences. The title track, for instance, is an arching dirge that takes shape around distended and dramatic guitar lines and choir-of-hell harmonies. It’s an awkward doom pose, like a tourist that knows the language of the land he’s visiting but lacks the subtlety or fluidity to engage native speakers. The first 90 seconds of closer “Holocaust Dawn” are incredible, as though Watain has forced its own basic form onto a carousel ride of horror. But the next five minutes mostly feel like a showcase for other heavy metal bona fides, with demented sound-art incantations brushing up against prog rock moves and thrash metal march. Outside of their element, Watain often sound simply like outsiders. They have strong interests and ideas, if not the experiences and abilities to actualize them. The effort is laudable, at least: Remember, Watain didn’t emerge as a fully formed great band, but they’ve grown into something of one. Maybe their clumsy stumbles, however public now, simply take time to perfect.
Watain’s most flagrant attempt to push past their expected border-- a nine-minute, lighters-up ballad called “They Rode On”-- serves as The Wild Hunt’s unprecedented centerpiece. Like Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” if Metallica had recorded it in 1988 instead of 1998, it’s a melodramatic portrayal of roving warriors on the lam, preparing for dismissal or death. While it’s symptomatic of the sickly self-conscious feeling that permeates at least half of The Wild Hunt, it’s also great, with Danielsson selling the role of beleaguered vagabond with the same authority he uses as seething frontman. Throughout The Wild Hunt, Danielsson lands some incredible phrases and images, painting his visions of Moloch and apocalypse in poetic couplets and teases. If nothing else, “They Rode On” serves as a clear showcase for his enthusiasm for Watain’s increasing intricacy. Maybe this is the song that introduces Watain to the masses. But more likely, maybe it’s just another indication of a band too restless for easy notoriety or Second Wave replications. That, at least, is more than what most everyone initially expected from Watain, The Revivalists.
