At last I got Drudkh on wax! Thanks to my vinyl addiction, 'Blood in Our Wells' is my first ever Drudkh platter. Never managed to get the previous ones on wax, so I've been stupid enough to pass the band's past releases. Keep that in your mind while reading this review, please.

The band's slightly folk-tinged black metal derivative paints painful landscapes of Ukrainian folk and their ancestors. Life and struggle for independence between two dictatorships and as cover art represents, life and death and struggle of families and sole human beings, it hasn't been easy for Ukrainian. While beginning with atmospheric folk music bit (lifted from the movie 'Mamay'), Drudkh have chosen the path of metal music. The band's black metal derivative sounds earthly, pastoral, bringing Irish Primordial to my mind more than anything else. Surely, melodic textures are quite different, but still somewhat alike. Of course the music is coloured with gliding keyboards and acoustic guitar passages, which do add that infamous folky element, but for the band's credit, they are very well done. Not that usual tinkling, plastic-sounding shite.

Songs are long and emotions vary between comfortless and epic, the music between attacking and sketching. When compared with other music of this style (you draw the lines yourself, please), 'The Blood in Our Wells' is intermediary raw and not very brutal, but the atmosphere it emits is splendid. Vocals are sung with usual, if good grim throat, which wells up from the soil of instruments. Sound-wise this is trebly yet still full and deep. And listening this on vinyl, it just raises the atmosphere for me. However, the vinyl version is really stripped down, not even lyrics (all sung in the band's native tongue) have been included, plus the cover painting is in black and white.

For me, it's now as easy as it gets to pick up previous Drudkh releases, even on CD, after hearing 'Blood in Our Wells'. This album gives me feelings some of the latter Primordial albums couldn't. Cruelty of nature, yet at same time its produce and affection, fear of enemy and simply put, the struggle to live, haven't been so finely and sentimentally pictured in metal music for some time. This will probably be lifted on the same throne with the classic moments of Bathory, Burzum, Primordial and such acts. Bold words, but this is a bold album.

Rating: 8½ (out of 10) ratings explained

Reviewed by Lane
06/26/2006 19:51