Band: WACHT
Country: Switzerland
Title: La mort
Label: Auric Records
Year: 2019
Style: Rhaeto-Romance Piano Music
Review:
Wacht is a Black Metal band from Switzerland with three albums and numerous splits, demos, and EPs underbelt, so this fourth and latest studio album comes as a surprise, at least for someone who's not that familiar with them (as it seems some weren't that surprised after all...). A Black Metal band releasing a totally acoustic full-length album made on piano and voices only isn't something you stumble upon everyday. So yes, the 7 tracks featured here are completely piano & vocals made, no other instruments added, a totally bold move from a Black Metal band also because it is performed by only 2 members of the band from the total of 5 the band has (they have two drummers, again not something you can usually see around), and also because its lyrics are completely written in Rumantsch language, one of the Switzerland's official languages only spoken by around 40.000 inhabitants of it's mountain regions, a language that sounds to me like a combination of Latin, French and Portuguese, so I can understand a big part of it (Romanian also being a Latin-derived language), which is pretty cool. Not much else to say, their Black Metal followers will avoid this album or buy it for its collector value and wait for the upcoming EP which will return to the band's Black Metal roots, and in what concerns fans of piano music I don't think they'll have exposure to this album keeping in mind how hermetic the Black Metal scene and its releases are, so all in all this could be considered as a caprice. Released in luxurious gatefold Digipak CD with 24 pages booklet featuring all lyrics and some beautiful landscape pictures of the mountains the above-mentioned language springs from; not sure how much value this album has from the music point of view, but from the lyrics and atmosphere it's really nicely made, hope to hear some such piano and clean vocal inserts in their upcoming EP, too.
Reviewed by Adrian
Rating: -/10
Contact:
indigen.ch
auricrecords.bandcamp.com