Rather than worry their band name sounds like some Ikea equivalent of a branded pack of dehydrated gravy granules, Sweden’s ORO, have pretensions above a particularly crude segue of an opening sentence attempting to breath life into a review of this their follow up album to 2019’s ‘Djupets Kall’ ‘The Call of the Deep’. The new album’s title roughly translates as ‘At the End of the World’, so you can rest assured that there are serious subjects, themes, and aspirations on the table. To summarise, this album is a glacial stare, a disconcerting glance and the cold shoulder as these songs are carried by the band into the distance, in a cloth sack and dumped into the nearest partially frozen lake.
Yes indeed, this is serious stuff. Cloaked in mystery, subterfuge, casual slight of hand and a delicate caress of the cheek, these songs sit firmly in the thinking man/women’s musical frame of reference. No throw away riffs here, this is all calculated walls of guitars, layer upon layer upon layer, like a varnish of beer, fag ash and tears on a corner table in a Neasden pub on a Wednesday afternoon. This is multi-faceted, creative, and clever work, that mines a particular genre of metal that has proven incredibly popular, lucrative, and expressionistic over the past ten to fifteen years or so through bands such as Isis (the band) and musical bedfellows such as Pelican, Cult of Luna, Helms Alee as well as UK originated bands such as Bossk, Pijn and Conjurer.
You’ll know the drill. Things start small, refrained, and quiet, before stretching things up to their full height as the vocals kicks in, all growled menace, searching, yearning, longing for a home, as the guitars pick up pace as they hurtle to shore, building, gliding, and billowing into ten-foot waves of aural mayhem. Skyscraper riffs, and towering vocals, against a bedrock of steady, monstrous drums, beating out a pulse, that the songs clamber onto and feast upon their warmth, before devouring the earth. Now, that might sound like it’s reaching the point of the written word equivalent of indulgence, but there is something about OLO, that distinguishes them slightly from the middle of the pack, in what has become an increasingly crowded genre of music, that if truth be told, is starting to become slightly stale, moribund, devoid of ideas and frankly dull.
But Vid Vägs Ände has enough about it to make it worthy of a recommendation and further listens. It may not be genre defining but that’s a difficult proposition in the current climate. What the band should be commended on, is creating an expansive, heavy, multi layered and intriguing album, that keeps your attention, whilst never outstaying it’s welcome. It manages to labour a point, a riff and a vocal phrasing just enough to embed itself into your soul, before pivoting away into another middle eight or guitar melody that allows the band to exhibit their serious musical chops. This is especially apparent on the track ‘Baltad’, which gently sways in the breeze of a delicate guitar phrase before segueing into other, heavier territories. It’s an enjoyable, musically interesting, and well performed piece of work that is played with gusto and poise. The production is warm yet steely, opening up the vocals, that are coated in hot wax before being hung out to dry in sub zero conditions. It sounds both massive, yet compact and bijou. Its clever without coming across as highfalutin and smug. Yes, there are things on here that have been done before by bigger and better well-known bands, but there is something on this album that feels honest, creative, and captivating. Overall, this is a good album, and despite only running to five tracks (with an average running time of nine minutes per track), it has a lot to say. It’s a dark and at times oppressive collection of songs, all sung in ONO’s native Swedish, which in some ways adds to the dark and gloomy atmosphere. Whether you’d want to christen this noise rock, sludge, post metal, matters not, just sit back, and dive beneath the waves and let this album fill your lungs with its salty, ozone flavoured embrace.
(7/10 Nick Griffiths)
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