ALBUM REVIEW: Wiegedood - “De Doden Hebben Het Goed II”

By: Conor O’Dea

Album Type: Full Length

Date Released: 10/02/2017

Label: Consouling Sounds

I cannot find any fault with this album. It is a rending and harrowing masterpiece, and I recommend it without reservation. At first, I found myself missing the longer songs of the debut, but the stripped out agony that this tighter piece represents is just brilliant...and gutting. Get it

“De Doden Hebben Het Goed II” CD//DD//LP track listing:

1. Ontzielling (07:32)
2. Cataract (11:11)
3. De Doden Hebben Het Goed II (08:29)
4. Smeekbede (06:13)

The Review:

There is something sublimely overwhelming about Wiegedood'sapproach to black metal; listening to “De Doden Hebben Het Goed” for me felt like slowly being battered to death by waves while simultaneously being dragged down by undertow. The sublimity here, however, comes from the sense of willingly letting go and being carried down into death by those black oceans. And why not? "The dead are faring well," as Wiegedoodtell us.

“De Doden Hebben Het Goed II” refines and enhances this sense of black metal rip tides and heavy, perilous gravity. More sparse than the debut album, but retaining the same pummelling undercurrents layered sinister melodic whorls and eddies, this album feels like a titration and distillation of the bleak poetics of Wiegedood'searlier work. This album is short; 33:25 in total length. But it has a definitive narrative arc that is compelling and elegantly structured. Opener “Ontzielling”rushes out at the listener, tsunami-like and unrelenting. This is the first immersion into violent, dark and frigid waters. “Cataract”conjures both the sense of the rushing flow of these waters and the deepening of that darkness through encroaching blindness. This track crescendos, then crashes and ebbs into the resignation and resolution of “De Doden Hebben Het Goed II.” Deep solemnity pervades the title track on the album, itself in: let yourself go, do not fight this drowning, the dead are doing well, join them. In the end, we return to deep grief and tragedy: supplication, pleading, begging – “Smeekbede”. This final song feels like the mourning and keening of those left behind by this death; a final howl, an agonising cry.

I cannot find any fault with this album. It is a rending and harrowing masterpiece, and I recommend it without reservation. At first, I found myself missing the longer songs of the debut, but the stripped out agony that this tighter piece represents is just brilliant...and gutting. Get it.

“De Doden Hebben Het Goed II” is available to buy/preorder here

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