This is the second album from Gaahls Wyrd, an avant-garde/dark metal band from Norway.
I really liked both 2019’s Gastir – Ghosts Invited and 2021’s The Humming Mountain, so the 42-minute Braiding the Stories is gratefully received. This is not music to be casually experienced, but an experience to be explored at length.
Braiding the Stories paints an engaging and atypical vista for the listener to explore and experience. It’s textured, detailed, and filled with atmospheric and emotive depth, but it’s also dark and menacing, with violence and danger lurking in the shadows. This combination of black metal’s heaviness and aggression alongside the introspection and atmosphere provided by the ambient and avant-garde influences make for a compelling album.
The black metal is incorporated into the overall musical tapestry of Braiding the Stories, and is only one influence. The heaviness and shades of light and texture result in songs that have a blackened aspect to them, but the songs are not strictly speaking black metal for the most part. Post-black metal may be the term for this in some ways, if it didn’t sound so wrong. Avant-garde metal? Dark metal? Ultimately it doesn’t matter; however you classify Braiding the Stories, it’s simply an extremely strong album. Richly atmospheric, hauntingly affecting, and infectiously insidious, the music lays seeds that grow and flower with every listen. Frequently ethereal and dream-like, this is music created with depth and substance.
Braiding the Stories brings together multiple compositional components, using them to build soundscapes that have elements common in such styles as progressive metal, post-rock, Gothic rock, shoegaze, doom, and more. It all is wrapped together tastefully and skilfully by artists that know how to craft music that has a voice of its own.
Mixing metal and non-metal together like artisans, Gaahls Wyrd have produced an evocative record that’s absorbing. It’s an album to fall into and lose yourself in, whether it’s the calm beauty of the title track, the black metal riffs of Time and Timeless Timeline, the gradually building tension of And the Now, the transportive leads of Visions and Time, the mind altering energies of Root the Will, or the delicate Gothic grace of the closing song Flowing Starlight. Braiding the Stories flows naturally and sweeps the listener away to shores unknown. I love albums that feel like a varied, holistic journey, and this is one such record.
Do not miss out on this.
Wonderbox Metal 