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Uvall > October Turns... Ruined > Reviews
Uvall - October Turns... Ruined

This is really fucking evil. - 92%

BeteNoir, October 5th, 2008

Bedroom black metal is the absolute worst genre in existence, I'll take top 40 chart pop over 95% of it any god damn day. There are so many awful awful bands who are actively rewarded for playing their instruments poorly and being as simplistic and repetitive as possible while using absolutely abrasive production just to make it that much worse. However, Uvall and a few other bands fall into that other 5% which actually captures and maturely expresses negative emotions. I know these kinds of terms are cliche, but the best way to describe Uvall's music is cold, bitter, sad, hateful, and very evil. Being able to convincingly evoke these types of feelings, displaying reasonably skilled musicianship, and having raw production quality intelligently applied is what separates terrible Uvall from Les Legiones Noires type "raw"(shit) black metal. This is also definitely bordering on black/doom, as the vocals are somewhat lower pitched and the tempo never accelerates beyond a crawl except in track 3.

The riffs themselves aren't simple or repetitive to a fault. The best way to describe them might be if Gorguts, Immolation, or Demilich played black metal, very dark, dissonant, and with an unorthodox sense of melody, but after repeated listens it starts to make sense. They just use some very odd intervals, harmonies, and chords that most of us are never used to hearing, and they sound really fucking dark. Think late period Deathspell Omega, only much less flashy and technical, which is probably a good thing. Like the aforementioned bands, there's quite a great deal of tempo shifts. Uvall go from Darkthrone-esque minimalism and quick simplistic drumming to painfully slow bizarre multi-layered dissonant harmonies and then quiet, soft, yet disturbing acoustic sections. There's a great deal of synth, clean guitar, and acoustic guitar here, and even some chanted vocals as well. The production is fairly clear, yet earthy, rich, and gritty, the guitars are trebly but not very distorted, surprisingly. The vocals however, are very distorted and mid pitched, they're rather quiet in the mix as well. The drums are a little too dominant, but very clear. Songs seem to change a lot over their courses, this is not one of the legions of awful black metal which will assault you with the same 3 riffs for 10+ minutes straight each song on an hour long album. I thought the composition was very mature in this respect, the transitions from section to section within each song and even between songs is just so mature, smooth, and natural. The entire album just felt extremely cohesive despite it's dissonant and volatile nature, even on first listen. The album has many ambient and acoustic sections, yet feels enveloping even during the more up-beat black metal sections.

Overall, this accomplishes the expression of the atmosphere and the feelings that countless numbers of terrible bands set out to accomplish and fail at miserably, this is an all too rare feat in itself. Uvall manage to top this with extremely technical song-writing that's nowhere near the obnoxious flashiness of some of it's contemporaries. If you're a fan of enveloping, dark, heavy, dissonant, and oppressive doom, black, or ambient music, this is the cream of the crop.