Until this album came along, “New World Order” for me was always a track by Pagan’s Mind. Now here’s another angle on it by Italy’s Void of Sleep. “Occult rhythms in a whirlwind of Psychedelic Madness” is how this is described.
I’m sure the band would be pleased to hear that this album is hard to categorise. Opening track “The Devil’s Conjuration” sets out a sinister path, then “Hidden Revelations” takes a progressive path with strong tinges of Opeth in the chorus line and overall melodic pattern. I’m interested. I was less interested in “Slaves Shall Serve”, which experiments with sound and style, which falls somewhere between hard rock and stoner. I found it a bit of a racket. It seemed to be a precursor for the more spaced out “Ordo ab Chao”, but I did like the way it died and resurrected itself towards the end. Just as I was coming to the conclusion that “New World Order” was becoming intangibly obscure, the title track comes along and has the essence of a nice song without losing crunchiness. The delicate vocal line is at odds with the sinister sub-structure, but to the credit of Void of Sleep, the contrasts are worked to good effect and the track commendably builds up its power level. The final track “Ending Theme” is fourteen minutes long. After an uninspired start, eventually the track finds some sort of psychedelic-weird-apocalyptic space before leaving us with a tantalising progressive taste on our lips. Now that’s interesting.
As an album, this was hard to grasp. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but whilst I appreciated “Hidden Revelations”, the title track and other bits and pieces, I struggled to get into the weird and not always so wonderful concept.
(6.5/10 Andrew Doherty)
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