Review Summary: It's the return of Magik, in a crystal palace
One of my favorite things to read is high fantasy. Long, winding chapters detailing intricate systems of magic, the history of various sentient species, the culture of a completely other realm. There’s something unerringly wonderful about shedding the woes and tribulations of the real world and getting lost in an entirely new one. That’s what makes it so pleasant that after nearly a decade and a half of absence, Rwake have crafted a storybook of a metallic tale, grand in scale yet cogent enough to satisfy.
Longer songs are prone to sag and bloat, and albums full of them even more so, but nothing Rwake present here feels excessive or meaningless. Shifting between beautiful acoustics to a dual-guitar metalcore strike, to doomier blackened post-metal and into roars of sermons on spirits of forests and ice,
The Return of Magik certainly lives up to its title. It evokes the deep woods and shadows it speaks of and invites the listener to venture further in and eventually through. Here Rwake flesh out songs into epics that still stand as contingent chapters.
“You Swore We’d Always Be Together” features an interlude of country-fried resonator before thundering about a curse that goes on forever, interpolating the old spell “Double double toil and trouble”, unafraid of a wailing yet melodic guitar solo. Each segment of
Return of Magik has its own twists and turns, surprises around every gloomy corner. At once full of riffs that’d be at home with
Darkest Hour and sludgy enough to wade through the murk more than once, it’s a cornucopia of everything that makes metal good without ever adhering to a single subgenre’s tenets. The title track is the most blackened, while also having a soliloquy delivered in hardcore bark. On the massive "Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration", the magic becomes more spiritual and scientific, after an introductory rant about the psychedelic incarceration of the title is a near-biblical track full of frequencies and stars and creation through Lucifer and flowers from Christ.
The Return of Magik is a lush soundtrack to a supernatural story, and hearing the band come together after almost 15 years gathering power is something to behold. Every beam is placed perfectly, every worn tool and weapon utilized to its fullest extent.
Rwake have always occupied this sort of metallic middle-lane, but in a world where every metal band and album is genre-tagged into oblivion even when it doesn’t quite make sense, it’s pleasant to see a band like Rwake defy all expectations and play the board in a way that makes it impossible not to take awe at the numerous influences and playbooks it draws from. At once melodic death metal, sludge, blackened metalcore, and something else altogether, it’s hard to pigeonhole Rwake and even more exciting to hear what amalgamations they summon forth across their sixth record.
