Dusted Reviews Artist: Wold Album: L.O.T.M.P. Label: Profound Lore Review date: Jan. 15, 2006

From the northern woods of Saskatchewan comes Wold, a darkly pantheistic trio whose “songs” serve as potent reminder that way too many trust fund hippies have thumbed through Hesse’s Siddhartha; this zeitgeist’s spiritualism now equates with civic centers full of home school’d suburbanites waving their hands in the air to boy next-door bands festooned with Jesus ringer-tees and coral chokers. Rather than wasting time felling these freaks, Wold waxes classical, spending the majority of L.O.T.M.P. penning paeans to Pre-Socratic ideology, specifically embodied by the Quattro Elementi: Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

The archetypal is invoked and ritualized. Instead of wine, intact hymens and bone awls, it’s keys, guitars and drums – a nearly pointless attribution, considering how the keys, guitars and drums are utilized. Instead of using instruments, Wold’s Opex, Obey and Fortress Crookedjaw apply their weaponry via Heideggerean notions of ready-to-hand and present-to-hand as musical objects and objective existence gleefully fistfuck one another until any notion of “friction” is lost in ecstatic disagreement.

The fight is as physical as it is psychological, with waves of steel-wool guitar stink shaking the mind out of its aroma thought-patterned therapy; martial drums welcoming weary warriors back to the village, blastbeating over the vocals in ham-fisted blows of bruise. Keys ponder in overdriven patterns, sounding like My Bloody Valentine at their most cacophonous, or Ride blowing off some Fuller’s-fueled steam with a piss-take in a wind tunnel. Vocals are caustic blasts of hate, not unlike Lord Imperial’s misanthropic yawps for USBM great, Krieg.

Mixing Black Metal, Power Electronics and even shoegaze, Wold’s L.O.T.M.P often sounds like Graveland’s In The Glare of Burning Churches competing with Merzbow’s Great American Nude/Crash for Hi-Fi. Genre fundamentals hysterically shoot to the surface and are swallowed again, their collective lungs drenched in Lake Winnipeg’s depths, drowned over and over again in the deep fucking din. When the Sabbatic odor subsides, Fotress Crookedjaw is left in situ, reclining in the plastic warmth of a black bear’s bowels.

By Stewart Voegtlin

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