I’ve listened to every genre of metal and rock, I’ve dived deep and the problem with that is I’ve heard it all and I grow bored of people who rehash the same shit in each genre. Now bands that I look for, especially now that I am older, are bands that branch out and create something new in their audio lab, instead of following a safe path of just playing straight up “thrash”, “grindcore”, “death metal”, “black metal”, “hard rock”, “indie rock” etc. they will take the other path that is overhung with dark trees and has a strange, unpredictable foreboding. Most bands balk and take the safe path playing the same retreaded riffs, with the same vocal styles, others like Mr. Bungle, Sunn O))), Spazztic Blurr etc. look at the foreboding path and yell “Challenge Accepted!” And Wrnlrd is one of those bands. And with “Pentagon” this one man weird metal machine goes deep into weird, acid trip territory and I love it.
First off, you get a really faded, silvery cover for the CD, almost haunting and wispy which actually describes the music contained within perfectly. The title “Pentagon” evokes images of the military and war but Wrnlrd sometimes to be going in a occult direction with the music, all one needs to do is look at the track titles and sub titles, names like “Annuit Coeptis”, “Death’s White City”, “Shaft of Ba’al”, “Awakening” and “V” not to mention track sub titles like “Maze of Light”, “Sun Wheel: Eye of Horns”, “Balefire: Temple of Briar”etc.
Now the music is stewed and brewed Black Metal, now I can hear the hipster traditionalist metal heads screaming their bitch heads off “THAT ISN’T METAL! MEH TRADITIONAL SONG STRUCTURE! WAH! WAH! WAH!” To those people I say “cry in a corner” these are the types of musical conservatives who piss in their black diapers when anybody tries anything different within a genre. Wrnlrd doesn’t give two fucks and does what he wants, according to an interview with Pitchfork (full disclosure, I fucking hate the hipsters at Pitchfork) he said: “I see ghosts of American music everywhere. I hear Dock Boggs in black metal, the droning banjo, voice like an earthquake. I hear Blind Lemon [Jefferson] pounding his feet on the floor, and I know he is my cousin… I think the essence of black metal is something that goes beyond geography and stylistic tradition, even beyond music.”
Apparently Wrnlrd played in a bluegrass band before his foray into avant garde black metal which explains the banjo plucking between tremolo strummed electric guitar, Wrnlrd experiments with different sounds, field recordings, echoing black metal, noise rock guitar screech, Sunn O))) type drones and dark ambient pieces. One can fall into this music and let their minds wander in it, devour it and savor it. There is no way I can do a “Bandwagon” feature on Wrnlrd because most of his releases in physical format are hard to find. He’s got his own bandcamp page but it doesn’t have “Pentagon” on it which is a damn shame. Granted the other stuff in his discography is equally as weird and different and highly recommended.
To listen to “Pentagon” in its entirety and you want to be swallowed by black droning muck go here, I flashed the alternate cover in the video also: https://www.bitchute.com/video/vfwC4g3MrD6G/
Here is Wrnlrd’s record label and bandcamp page without “Pentagon” the albums they have up are prime grade avant garde black metal, some of which I will get around to reviewing in the future: https://flingcosound.bandcamp.com/music
