Review Summary: Abigail Williams do away with the ambitions of Becoming for a more psychedelic and concise concoction.
The seemingly constant identity crisis of Abigail Williams is made apparent in each of the band’s releases. Albums would jump musical styles starkly, causing accusations to fly about frequent trend hopping and unoriginality within the black metal genre. From the revolving door nature of band members coming and going, to multiple disbandments, nothing about Abigail Williams is reliable or consistent, musically or otherwise. It’s fair to say that the band members haven’t exactly had an easy career with how tumultuous everything has been, which certainly could contribute to lack of a consistently established musical identity.
The Accuser follows their most ambitious release
Becoming with yet another drastic change. This time around, Abigail Williams forsake extended Wolves in the Throne Room-esque ambience and 10+ minute epics for a shorter, more straightforward direction alongside a syrupy, psychedelic backdrop.
Becoming’s dense walls of sound mesh with the searing, more streamlined style of
In The Absence of Light for a quick run of melodic black metal cuts with droning, mind-bending soundscapes to break up the harsh metal. What
The Accuser gets right is avoiding the awkward songwriting and dragging nature that plagued early releases. Each section of “Forever Kingdom of Dirt” transitions quickly and effortlessly, as a wickedly dissonant guitar melody breaks up the mid-tempo jamming, then closes out with a shredding guitar solo in a matter of minutes. Examples like these show how Abigail Williams have matured by cutting out decent but repetitive material in favor of a much more immediate, punchier effect.
The production job delivers a throwback version of raw, lo-fi aesthetics sure to please the purists. This interestingly makes the psychedelic passages particularly eerie, beautifully displayed in the murky closer “Nuumite.” “The Cold Lines” is also a slower, more experimental track, and one of the weirdest and creepiest creations the band has ever recorded. Aside from these mind-bending anomalies, the rest of
The Accuser is a ferocious assault on the senses. “Path of Broken Glass” and “Of The Outer Darkness” consist of unrelenting tremolo picked guitars and blasting drums galore, tearing through some of the band’s most intense and evil sounding dissonances and harmonies yet.
While the deathcore-meets-symphonic black metal route of early material was certainly a rocky start, Abigail Williams has since shown a noticeable maturation in songwriting and originality with each release. Those looking for
Becoming Part II within
The Accuser are missing the point of what Abigail Williams do. Modernizing classic motifs of what the genre could offer only got the band members so far, and it’s nice to see them finally step into their own to be more than just competent influencees of classic Scandinavian metal bands.
Becoming might always be the group’s magnum opus, but
The Accuser further establishes that comparing albums by Abigail Williams to each other is a futile affair. The point is that they end up achieving their sudden style changes with their own kind of grace, which is all that can be expected of the talented, diverse, indomitable qualities they have more than proven to possess.
