Winds Devouring Men

The first part of a new trilogy by Elend, Winds Devouring Men is a marked change for Elend. It's a much more placid release, to begin with. It's still scary as fuck, mind you, but not in such an overt way. It's 'Rosemary's Baby' as opposed to 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'.

The female soprano vocals are gone, as are the hellish male screams (in the main). Instead, the semi-spoken baritone reminds one of Dead Can Dance's Brendan Perry or The Sisters of Mercy. The quality of the vocals is surprisingly good. In fact, in places they could be described as nothing short of amazing. After the incredibly expressive whispers/spoken words that open 'Charis', it fades out with slow, haunting moans that will surely send shivers down your spine.

Elend's previous album trilogy was far more 'classically' oriented, although that term must be used loosely. It's probably more apt to describe it as percussionless black metal played on violins and cellos. Although the string quartet is still present, Winds Devouring Men is much more synthesised and closer to traditional darkwave. This is most evident in the slow, brooding beauty of the first four tracks. After that, the album descends into the more familiar chaos of Les Tenebres du Dehors and The Umbersun, although it's more industrial noise than the string-based assault of those aforementioned albums. The darkwave style emerges again later, although the later tracks fail to reach the heights of the beginning.

This is what prevents Winds from reaches the giddy echelons promised in the opening 10 minutes. The experimental middle section is also too drawn out - it is most effective when juxtaposed with the melodic passages and consequently loses impact as it continues somewhat aimlessly.

Although the album is therefore inconsistent, the flaws do not detract from the aching, affecting highlights, which alone make this album a must-have.

It's really hard to find albums which are emotionally so powerful that there just isn't a way of listening to them only as a mere background music. Winds Devouring Men just has such an emotional impact that it will drown you in it's darkness and despair in a matter of minutes every time you listen to it.

In my opinion there just isn't any comparision beetween Elend and countless darkwave/dark symphonic bands. While the aftermentioned ones concentrate on simple, floating and lush atmosphere with simplistic harmonies and haunting melodies, Elend uses actually complex and modern orchestrations, mostly done on real symphonic instruments instead of synthesizers, mixes that with industrial noises, much like contemporary electronic art-music and somehow just creates a drama, which carries troughout the album and leads the listener through fear, sadness, opression, chaos and eventually misery and remorse. There is just so much depth in this album that it makes this album almost a timeless piece of art. It combines the best parts of atonal contemporary western art music, electroacoustic music, industrial, gothic and darkwave and results in something that just hasn't been heard ever before. This isn't just your basic darkwave. This is a lot more. This sure isn't metal either, but it's darker and more opressive than vast majority of doom/dark metal acts you'll ever find.

Of course music like this isn't easy. It takes a lot from the listener. You have to have an open mind, musical intelligence and will to venture far into unexplored musical territories. The previous reviewer shows a good example of what happens if you don't have what it takes to understand music like this. Musically and artistically Elend's Winds cycle is one of the most musically ambitious projects I have ever heard. It's not fault of the music if some casual melodeath listeners *cough cough* find it too hard to comprehend.

Just listen to the bonus track, Silent Slumber, and you'll get the idea. It's most likely one of the saddest musical pieces ever written.

You may call it avant-garde. You might call it art. Never mind, this album is just more pseudo-intellectual stuff not even worth a try. Of course, this is not metal, not even gothic or doom metal: gothic is supposed to convey some kind of dark beauty - while this is neither beautiful nor even dark, whereas doom is supposed to be crushing, oppressive, despairing - while this is nothing more than plain boring.

Do you want to release an “avant-garde” album like Winds Devouring Men? Then just put together an handful of violins, backed by some average opera singers, a piano playing random chords during sixty minutes, and above all a singer who himself sounds more bored than any of his listeners, who speaks more often than he actually sings, and who can’t take less than three minutes to tell a single sentence. Then play as slow as possible, include breaks every two measures (Vision is All that Matters, A Staggering Moon), AND, eventually, don’t forget to periodically drown everything under tons of ambient and indus noise. The title track, with its 4’30 of indus landscapes backed by a single keyboard and some ultra-distorted guitar, will teach you how to do that, however you might prefer Away from Barren Stars, ending with not less than three minutes of the same indus shit, repeated over and over again.

Don’t use any drums, of course - only timpani sometimes, though you may find a drum machine more convenient - nor any bass or guitar (except the aforementioned one on the title track, but was it really worth being mentioned?). People don’t have to think you’re doing a metal album, and indeed you’re not. Don’t even bother if listeners can’t tell one song from another (the first three tracks for instance), you’ll still be able to add some more indus noise to make the difference (Under War-Broken Trees). Don’t bother if the singer sings exactly the same way on every track – he HAS to: same intonations, same vocal lines (not joking), same pseudo-intellectual introspective lyrics, in four languages (English, German, French, Latin, and I may have forgotten another one), it sounds so more clever - especially in the same sentence. Make sure this singer hasn’t slept the four nights before, to manage to recreate this so awfully boring, sleep-inducing tone.

And, last but not least, don’t forget to wrap everything in some artsy package including a booklet where lyrics are written a way you can’t tell lyrics from one song from the ones from another; now, if you want, add a bonus track which is the exact copy of every other song on the album. Now you got your avant-garde album, and a 35% review for the underground and avant-garde factor only, and for the crystal-clear production which might be the only redeeming point of this... shit.

Just notice that I never said you had to know anything about music.

Highlights: none.