Review Summary: A sure cure for insomnia.
Conforming to almost every USBM stereotype in the book, one man black metal outfit I Shalt Become boils up a generic soup of sad emotions with
The Pendle Witch Trials. Even being someone who enjoys bands like Xasthur and Leviathan to a degree, I found
The Pendle Witch Trials to be an unexceptional blob of an album leaving much to be desired in the way of dimension.
The biggest problem with
The Pendle Witch Trials is its refusal to expand beyond one theme. Every song on the album from beginning to end dwells completely in the realm of depression and only lazily meanders around within it, rarely taking anything resembling actual direction. This results in songs that are for all intents and purposes the same; there isn’t any need to listen to more than one of the songs as they all express the same exact thing in almost the exact same way. One short spurt in “Denial” is the only time the album ever exceeds a snail-pace, and that phrase lasts only for ten seconds. Shortly thereafter, the song continues down the same path as the rest of the songs, plodding and droning on and on into oblivion. Even the ambient track “The Tragedie of Macbeth: Actus Quintus, Scena Quinta” manages to sound the same as the rest of the tracks despite the lack of guitars; it plods and drones the same way the rest of the album does, with a similar melody and vocal arrangement to boot.
Bands like I Shalt Become that have a hard time writing songs different from one another tend to use varying and memorable vocal arrangements to their advantage. Well,
The Pendle Witch Trials does no such thing; the vocals serve as just another proponent making each song difficult to distinguish from the last. I have a hard time believing the album even has any lyrics, seeing as how the vocals just consist of the same throat noises repeated over and over. Every now and again you’ll hear a croak behind the guitars, maybe a howl or an “oooooo!” if you’re lucky. If lyrics were written for
The Pendle Witch Trials, it was a completely throwaway effort.
Why bands like I Shalt Become insist upon releasing the same album of cheesy synth lines and stolen Burzum riffs over and over is beyond me.
The Pendle Witch Trials might be depressing, sad, tortured or what have you but it fails to deliver music with any real purpose but to express these themes in the most one-dimensional manner possible. You’d be hard-pressed to find music less exciting than this; in fact, it may be best to just leave this one where it clearly wants to be: alone.
