Owls Woods Graves blur black metal and punk once more
FORMED by The Fall/Michal Stepien with E.V.T./Piotr Dziemski, Owls Woods Graves burst out of the Polish metal scene with a relatively decent self-titled EP in 2016. Three years later, the band dropped its first full length album Citizenship of the Abyss.
An impressive crossover of black metal and punk, the album saw the duo come into its own, shedding how were previously seen merely as the masked live bassist and guitarist for Mgla, one of Poland’s biggest black metal bands.
History once again repeats itself with Owls Woods Graves’s latest album Strix. Easily reaching the heights of Citizenship of the Abyss and Secret Spies of the Horned Patrician that released in between, Strix is a great, rip-roaring album filled front to back with riffs drenched in black metal and punk.
Having said that, in the Venn diagram where black metal and punk as subgenres intersect, there exists an even smaller circle dead centre of it. A colourless, lightless realm where subgenres lose meaning, Strix sits upon the throne in the maw of this abyss.
Ravenous dissonance becomes ghoulish design
In black metal, song structures are unconventional and typically deviates from the standard verse-to-chorus-to-verse compositions. It is one of the many defining aspects of the subgenre.
Strix pushes this to the limit, particularly with how often it crosses black metal into punk and vice versa, making the album and the songs in it impossible to classify, but there is a clear pattern of there being more blackened punk than standard black metal punk songs.
Songs such as Anarcho-Occultism, Black Flame in Our Hearts and Say No to Heaven even seem to be inspired by Oi! subpunk rock. The remaining few, such as They Come Again, The Cliff Dance and Winged They Come hew closest to black metal punk with all the tremolo picking and blast beats.
However, none of these are a complaint. Each of Owls Woods Graves two previous albums demonstrated distinct identities of their own and Strix is no different.
It is different from Citizenship of the Abyss and Secret Spies of the Horned Patrician, certainly, but Strix still scratches the itch for that weird, flexible crossover of black metal and punk distinct to the band.
