Tuesday 5 April 2016

Single: Wood Lake - Hollow

Wood Lake Hollow Canada


Wood Lake - Hollow


- Review by Noël Duplaa

Info: Ottawa based shoegaze band Wood Lake have released the follow up to their 2014 album For Future Generations. 'Hollow' is the lead single from their forthcoming album, Hell, and showcases their experimental side, melding their more melodic shoegaze leanings to an unforgiving black metal .

Let’s just go ahead and throw Deafheaven in straight away - with Sunbather, the San Fran band explored a rich seam between the reverbed crescendos of shoegaze and the visceral, unblinking assault of black metal, and, more than that, took it overground, uniting the blogosphere and appearing on most respectable end of year lists the world over.  But if Deafheaven were a metal band dabbling with shoegaze textures, Wood Lake are a shoegaze band exploring the pummelling momentum of metal.  

With vocals similar to Mew or the earlier, better Dandy Warhols stuff, they employ that beautiful trick, invented and perfected by the likes of My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus & Mary Chain, of framing a melodic and harmonic pop song within walls of violent sound. Which all results in a thoroughly thrilling and galvanised introduction to a band who are clearly as much in love with the propulsive as the melodic, and if you say that you predicted the brass section at the end, then you, sir, are a liar and a communist.


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