
WATAIN
The Agony & Ecstasy Of Watain (Nuclear Blast)
Swedish black metal band Watain, back with new album The Agony & Ecstasy Of Watain, are perhaps members of the genre’s noble caste as opposed to its royalty, but they’ve long been one of the more prominent names in the scene. This is thanks to a series of reliably swaggering, classic metal-infused albums, an infamous stage show replete with blood and pyro, and an approach to Satanism that goes beyond entry-level teen bonehead rebellion but stops short of anything that might make you chinscratch when you could headbang.
No hectic workers, The Agony & Ecstasy Of Watain is their first album for four years and debut for Nuclear Blast. Midpaced by black metal standards and using clean guitar parts to good effect, Erik Danielsson has matured as a lyricist, with a Romantic poet’s cadence to some of his lines. A more varied attack would have made a good album great, though, Farida Lemouchi’s guest vocal on We Remain is a taste of that potential.
words NOEL GARDNER