Arbor keeps falling out of a blast into a crawl and climbing back out again. A passage will run at full speed, double kicks rolling under it, and then the floor drops and the same band is moving at half the pace, heavy and deliberate, before gathering itself for the next surge. That habit of sudden deceleration places Wazzara on the heavier side of blackgaze, closer to the doom end of the spectrum than to the bright, dreamy territory the word often suggests.
The drums carry most of this. Andrei Jumugă, who produced the album and played on it as a session drummer, switches between crushing half-time grooves and double-time blasts with very little warning, and the band follows him in both directions without losing shape. The switch rarely feels like a gimmick. A doom groove arrives as a release of pressure after the blasts, and the next blast comes in as if the slow section had been building towards it all along. Double-kick runs fill the space between the two, so even the steadier stretches keep a forward pull.
In the fast sections the guitars turn to tremolo picking and stack up into walls of distortion. This is the blackgaze side of Wazzara, and it is where the record sounds most expansive: the notes blur into a single, continuous wash that sits on top of the blasting rather than cutting through it. When the tempo halves, that wash thins out and the chords underneath come forward. They are slow, minor-key progressions, played heavy and given room to ring, and they carry most of the album’s sense of weight. The songs are long but forever evolving and never boring.
The comparisons Wazzara draw for themselves are apt and worth separating out. Alcest is the obvious ancestor for the shimmering tremolo passages, though Arbor spends far more of its time in heavy, grinding territory than Alcest usually do. Sylvaine is the nearer match in spirit, for the way a clean, melodic voice is set against black metal speed. Oathbreaker shares Wazzara’s readiness to turn harsh without warning. The kinship with Downfall of Gaia shows in the long builds and the sheer mass of the slow sections, and Fen is a fair reference for how the atmospheric passages and the aggressive ones are woven together rather than taken in turns.
Barbara Brawand’s clean lead, often stacked two or three voices deep in harmony, floats over all of this, with high black metal shrieks cutting in against it.
Arbor is Wazzara’s fourth release, and the first full-length they have put out in five years and it is a haunting, beautiful and incredible piece of work. It is out now, and it was recorded between the band’s own Swiss home studios and Consonance Studio, Timișoara. None of that is audible in the playing, which sounds like a band and its drummer locked together in one room. The production keeps the tremolo walls dense without burying the kick drum, and so the tempo changes register physically as well as on paper.
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