WHITE WARD — Love Exchange Failure (review)

WHITE WARD — Love Exchange Failure album cover Album · 2019 · Atmospheric Black Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
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.)
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Tupan wrote:
more than 2 years ago
I think I prefer their former album, or maybe I need to listen this again. Great album, anyway.

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