ALBUM OF THE WEEK ON MSN'S METAL BLOG

Here's a nice review of "Before the Plane..." written by Adrien Begrand.

Album of the Week:

Wild Hunt, Before the Plane of Angles (Kemado)

When Ludicra split up a year ago the metal world lost one of the Bay Area’s most inventive bands, one that might have been rooted in one particular subgenre – in their case, black metal – but in reality displayed an openness to other influences that lent their music a unique quality that stood out far apart from anything else in metal. Such bands are rare, so it was no surprise that the news of Ludicra’s demise was greeted with great disappointment from those who had followed the band over the previous decade. When a defiantly, daringly original band splits, who knows when someone in their local scene pick up where they left off?

Wild Hunt might hail from grittier, blue-collar Oakland instead of Ludicra’s San Francisco, and the their music might differ considerably from each other, but there’s no mistaking both bands are cut from the same cloth. Like Ludicra, and even Norwegian innovators Enslaved, Wild Hunt doesn’t care one iota about genre restrictions. The foursome of guitarists Greg Brace and Drew Cook, bassist West Lenz, and drummer/vocalist Harland Burkhart take bits and pieces from black metal, progressive metal, traditional heavy metal, doom, and even ambient music on their debut album and create something that’s not only unlike anything in American metal right now, but for all its eclecticism is startlingly cohesive.

What’s so remarkable about Before the Plane of Angles is its sense of restraint. The compositions, especially the two 16-minute tracks that bookend the album, “Eidetic Parallax” and “Plane of Angles”, meander, yet it’s never the kind of labyrinthine arrangement that has you wishing you had a riff map to follow along. Instead, the songs flow so gracefully that it’s simply easy to take in, suite-like songs shifting from movement to movement so seemingly naturally that the shifts from style to style hardly feel like a surprise. Granted, the album isn’t without its more immediate moments as well, and two of the middle three tracks on the album showcase Wild Hunt at their most accessible. The opening riff of “Panorama” bears a strong resemblance to the icy guitar sounds of Enslaved’sRuun album before dissolving into an ambient piece reminiscent of Tangerine Dream. “Window to the Nether” shifts from mid-tempo black metal grooves to the muscular American crunch of Mastodon and early Baroness,Burkhart providing haunting chanted vocals, the song becoming more and more blackened the longer it goes on.

Time and again Wild Hunt pulls the rug out from under the listener on this album, yet they do so in a way that’s not jarring, which is where that black metal influence comes in to play. The band’s musical influences are all over the map, but similar to Ludicra, their feet are firmly planted in black metal. That sound is always there in some way, shape, or form, and while the band uses black metal more as a springboard toward exploring new sounds, the black metal element keeps the music grounded. As a result the compositions never once fly off the handle, a great example being “Plane of Angles”, which retains that influence while at the same time taking the music further and further outside the realm of the “cvlt” towards something a lot more progressive and unpredictable. Before the Plane of Angles is a rarity in American metal, a daring, confident debut that instantly creates a one of a kind identity for the band, one that’s set to establish Wild Hunt as the next underground favorite in Bay Area metal. Ludicra’s title is theirs for the taking.

THEY'RE HERE...

Holy crap! Could it be?? Yes indeedy, the gatefold 2xLP's of "Before the Plane of Angles" are here. Grab one of your own while supplies last, at Kemado.com. Or, if you make it to our release show May 19th at El Rio SF, we'll have some on hand there too. 

WILD HUNT ON NOISE CREEP

Harland lists 5 "obscure" bands to check out on noisecreep.com:

Wild Hunt is a mystical, blackened metal band from Oakland. If you're a fan of groups like Ludicra, Hammers of Misfortune and Weakling, you might already be familiar with them, since they run in some of the same circles. Wild Hunt's vocals are handed by drummer Harland Burkhart who possesses a creepy, almost drugged-like singing voice.

The quartet is gearing up for the release of Before the Plane of Angles, their debut album. Wild Hunt recently debuted one of the album's tracks, "Window to the Nether," at this link.

When his publicist told us that Burkhart was a huge fan of cultish metal, Noisecreep asked if we could get him to send us a list of five groups that he's been listening to lately. Check out his picks and be ready to be turned onto some crazy stuff!

Ved Buens Ende

"Maybe not that obscure anymore, but this pick is still definitely an oddball one. This is an example of the weirdness that sprung out of the Norwegian black metal scene in the mid-'90s when, for some, wearing corpsepaint and screaming about Satan was starting to run its course. This is heavy music straight from the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."

Truppensturm

"This is war metal at its finest. These Teutons have honed in on a sound so chaotic and relentless, you might find yourself transported to a bombed out trench in World War II."

Loincloth

"Here's an insanely talented instrumental band from Virginia. Pen Rollings (ex-Breadwinner, the first band to be labeled "math rock") used to be in this group, and 2 of the 3 current members are from the technical doom band Confessor. So, you could probably guess what you're gonna get here---total head-scratching polyrhythmic odd-meter madness. The crazy thing is that it's actually enjoyable to listen to! Complexity without pretentiousness."

Circle

"I put these guys in here because metal is definitely a part of their sound, but I doubt metal-archives.com would list them. Still, I say Circle's Katapult album is an essential piece of music for metalheads looking for something off the beaten path. The song "Saturnus Reality" makes me think of Frank Zappa teaming up with Dødheimsgard, or something."

Misery's Omen

"This is an Australian group with members of Stargazer, Cauldron Black Ram, Mournful Congregation, etc. They feature some phenomenal bass playing from Damon Good, and some truly beautiful black/doom melodies throughout. At times the go kind of jazzy (sounds terrible, right?), and other times they get subtly humorous. They are one of my favorite black-ish metal bands."

"PANORAMA" FEATURED ON AD HOC BLOG:

Kim Kelly of adhoc.fm writes: 
Oakland, California is a tough town, known for its gritty DIY punk & metal scene and status as San Francisco's leaner, meaner twin sibling. It's not exactly a bastion of calm, but you wouldn't know it listening to the newly surfaced but already buzzworthy Wild Hunt. Their first record, Before the Plane of Angles, is slated for a May 1st release via Kemado Records, and the band's profile has already been buoyed by an enthusiastic endorsement from Agalloch/Worm Ouroboros drummer Aesop Dekker. Their progressive, expansive take on modern black metal is reminiscent of latter-day Enslaved in its willingness to embrace the sublime alongside the savage; they incorporate swaths of ambient music, field recordings, and a traditional heavy metal sensibility to create something quite unique, and wonderfully absorbing. Check out "Panorama" below.


http://soundcloud.com/adhocfm/wild-hunt-panorama

INVISIBLE ORANGES PREVIEW

InvisibleOranges.com premiered "Window to the Nether" today:

http://www.invisibleoranges.com/2012/04/io-exclusive-track-stream-wild-hunts-window-to-the-nether/

MEAT/MEAD/METAL REVIEW

Nice review by Brian Krasman of meatmeadmetal:

Wild Hunt blend black, trad, prog metal on excellent ‘Before the Plane of Angles’

April 18th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

I walk my dog every day, and while fighting to control a feisty, 8-month-old pup made out of muscle can be so much fun (right down to the forearm bruises), it can be a little mundane once she calms down and starts walking like a normal animal. See, we take the same route every day because the options are limited in our neighborhood and because there’s enough hill to get in a good workout. For both of us. But seeing the same stuff and doing the same thing every day can be monotonous, so I choose wisely my musical selections for our journeys.

Grindcore or punk doesn’t work because it’s too fast and doesn’t last long enough. Something post-metal doesn’t really do the trick because it just makes me gaze into the distance, and a walk is not a good setting for that. Black metal just puts a scowl on my face, and I don’t need people thinking I’m some sort of criminal (the weird metal shirts and half-arm of tattoos already get me cautious looks). Instead, I need something with a little variety, an album that’ll keep my head in the game and let my brain work along with my (aching) muscles.

That’s where Wild Hunt enter the fray. They do all kinds of things I like a lot — prog rock! trad metal! doom! black metal! – and they mix it all together really nicely in a way where you’re less aware of the twists and turns and more conscious of how well all the elements work together to achieve a greater whole. Their music on their debut full-length “Before the Plane of Angles” (Kemado) is exciting and varied, complex and digestible, and it has kept the juices flowing on those walks because I’m thinking far less about how I take the same trip every day and more about how this record keeps revealing itself to me in a different manner every time I listen. It’s such a great record, and it’s so hard to believe that a band this good, this flexible are just now issuing their debut. I can only imagine how the next platter’s going to sound. I have a hard enough time properly summarizing this one.

Wild Hunt, who formed in 2004, call Oakland, Calif., home, so yeah, we’re talking another Bay Area barnstormer. But these guys are one of the most ambitious, exciting bands to come out of that area in a long time, which is saying something considering the amount of talent in that region. This band — vocalist/drummer Harland Burkhart, guitarists Greg Brace and Drew Cook, bassist West Lenz — play around with epic-length songs, which works to their advantage since they’re adept at playing so many styles of metal and, as noted, blending them together. Oh, a quick note of interest is that Burkhart, Brace, and Cook also play in the Dimesland (Vendlus), another group that isn’t your run-of-the-mill metal band. I know all these details just tossed out there about Wild Hunt might make you think “Before the Plane of Angles” could be something that’ll take you a while to digest, but it really isn’t. At least for me, the appeal of the record and their sound was instantaneous, and the more I heard the album, the more excited I got about it.

The record is book-ended by a pair of 16-minute songs, both of them equally expansive and awesome. “Eidetic Parallax” opens the album and goes from spacious prog rock, to black metal panic and shrieks from Burkhart, space-bound melodies, trance-inducing flushes of atmosphere, and adventurous riffing before the whole thing fades away. “Plane of Angles” is the closer, and it’s built in much the same way, with all of the things they do well revisited — but not repeated — but it also gets a bit of acoustic wonder, some power metal-fireworks, the band harmonizing vocally underneath the firestorm, and eventually a tricky, dream-like loop that carries the album off into oblivion. These two cuts are worth the price of admission alone, but they’re only part of the story.

In between those epic pillars are three more songs that serve to prove the band’s incredible dexterity. “Panorama” is one of the heaviest tracks on the album, with more black doom magic, some classic metal guitar work, throaty singing and growling, and a long, cosmic ambient passage that stretches over the song’s last three minutes. “Window to the Nether” is pushy and catchy, showing they have a knack for writing something a little more accessible, and the cleanly delivered vocals remind a bit of Baroness. “Unravel the Veil” is the shortest cut here, a wooshing, hazy instrumental built on Moog fog and light instrumentation, letting you get a breather before the monstrous finale.

Wild Hunt’s debut long-player is one of the more exciting initial offerings to come my way this year, and I’m still having a lot of fun working with it. The band combines all the things I like best about metal and in a way that suggests they feel the same way about these things. They’re not here riding on some trend or cashing in on a sound. They seem to be putting all of their influences together in a fluid, thunderous way, and “Before the Plane of Angles” certainly keeps things interesting every time out. That’ll make walking a lot more enjoyable for the foreseeable future.

EARLY SHOW, APRIL 22

Here's Christy's flyer for the early show, April 22nd. 4-8!