siLLy puPPy Amongst the wealth of black metal bands coming from around the world, perhaps no other nation has captured the bleakest sounds better than the Ukraine. For some reason this region of the world is just teeming with lo-fi angst-ridden doomsday-seeking musicians dwelling on as much misanthropy, horror and depression as humanly possible. WHITE WARD is one of countless black metal bands from Ukraine which formed in Odessa in 2012.

WHITE WARD wasted no time cranking out a couple demos and this debut EP titled ILLUSIONS which fits the textbook definition of depressive black metal on its way to post-black and blackgaze terrain. While the band would eventually meander into atmospheric black metal, on ILLUSIONS they fall squarely in the depressive aisle of the metal supermarket on the shelf next to Sweden’s Shining and the San Francisco based Leviathan but not really quite as accomplished in the creativity department.

At this stage the lineup was Alexey Sidorenko (vocals), Vladimir Bauer (bass), Yuiry Konoov (drums), Yuriy Kazaryan (guitars) and Alexander Smirnov (guitars). This EP only has three lengthy tracks but the playing time still just misses the 25 minute mark. While the band has been getting more attention in recent years for adding jazz elements to its blackgaze haziness, at this stage WHITE WARD was pretty much a standard nondescript sounding depressive black metal band.

The repetitive monotonous chugging guitar riffs, apathetic drums and melodic wailing guitar parts in the background are like the musical equivalent to a suicide note as the vocals growl away beneath the depressive banter of the guitar distortion and mid-tempo rhythmic drive. Overall ILLUSIONS is a decent slice of depressive black metal but also falls squarely into generic mediocrity as there is absolutely nothing on this one that makes WHITE WARD stand out from its more famous Western European contemporaries. Still though if you can’t get enough of this style of black metal, it’s certainly not a waste of time either.

Warthur White Ward's Love Exchange Failure has an album cover which looks like it might belong to, say, one of M83's ambient-synthpop releases, perhaps from around the same era as Before the Dawn Heals Us. As with the likes of other groups in the corner of atmospheric black metal called "blackgaze", appearances can be deceiving: this remains an album with a strong black metal presence.

It's not, by any means, purist black metal - rather, it's a broader sort of blackgaze-postrock-dark jazz soundscapearama, a musical mashup in which the sounds and techniques of black metal are merely part of the sonic toolkit that White Ward bring to the table - an essential enough part of the toolkit that those interested in the experimental reaches of the genre would likely be interested, but there are other important tools here too (the aforementioned postrock and jazz influences), to an extent that if you greatly prefer your black metal albums to be black metal all the way through without a break the quieter interludes may bug you. (That said, of course, atmospheric black metal in general isn't averse to including such elements on an album, so really that's a caveat which applies to the entire subgenre.)

adg211288 I've said it before, but Futility Report (2017), the debut full-length album by Ukrainian atmospheric black metal/blackgaze act White Ward, gives me need to say it again: out of all the various styles of metal music, the only one that still manages to surprise me on a regular basis is black metal. These guys have been around since 2012 and their early work is said to have had depressive black metal qualities to it, but they've since evolved their music into something a lot more experimental.

The six track album starts off with Deviant Shapes, which for a short length suggests the band to be following the fairly typical blackgaze style of atmospheric black metal, but then the band suddenly turn their music into jazz and any notions of Futility Report being a generic record are instantly dispelled. A quick check reveals in fact that White Ward, much like Japan's Sigh, actually have a full-time saxophone player in their line-up in addition to the usual roles of vocals, guitars, bass and drums.

Now, jazz isn't exactly an unheard of ingredient in metal, but I'm normally used to hearing the influence crop up in genres other than black metal, even if saxophone's have seen use to some extent by bands such as Winterhorde, Aenaon and of course the aforementioned Sigh, though their work tends to look more towards the avant-garde since Dr. Mikannibal joined in 2007. I find jazz more likely something to be heard in avant-garde metal acts like Akphaezya and progressive metal acts like To-Mera. But even when it does feature in metal through groups like those it isn't usually as prominent as it is on White Ward's Futility Report. This record goes some way towards realising something I've long been surprised hasn't already become more of a thing: a true fusion of jazz and metal. It isn't exactly how I expected such a thing to sound of course, but maybe that's a good thing.

This is not, on paper at least, the most obvious pairing of influences, but there's something else I've said before which I believe I read in an interview with, as it happens, Sigh (presumably it was Mirai Kawashima, but as I point out every time I refer to this I'm only going on memory and it was in an old issue of Metal Hammer UK that I've long since thrown out, so I could be mistaken despite being 99% sure): that anything can be done with black metal. That's in turn why this is the genre that still manages to surprise me, as Futility Report has done. What White Ward have created simply works, offering up a unique take on the atmospheric black metal template that in some tracks such as Stillborn Knowledge also offers up the odd progressive touch in the metal side of the music, which for me suggest that White Ward could be producing even more interesting material in the future if they can hone those influences a bit while keeping their atmospheric black metal/jazz thing they have going for them intact.

I'm not sure exactly what you'd call an album such as Futility Report. I kind of want to call it 'atmospheric blackjazz' but I can't really do that without thinking of the Norwegian jazz turned avant-garde/industrial metal band Shinning, who don't really have a lot if anything to do with black metal, and blackened jazzgaze downplays the role of black metal in the album. One thing is for sure: whatever this is, it works really smoothly. Note the name White Ward. It's one to watch.