Abigail Williams – Becoming (2012)

With yet another crushing blow, Abigail Williams is set on conquering the US Black Metal scene on 2012 with “Becoming”. In this release the band morphs once more from their Symphonic BM roots into a hybrid of Cascadian hipster Black Metal and straight-up European Melodic Black Metal. While many people might call them pretentious or undefined, we totally love how this band keeps popping up with different styles and overall excellently crafted music.

Similar to tracks by Wolves in the Throne Room, “Ascension Sickness” opens this release with a hefty dose of atmospheric elements, crushing BM shrieks, powerful riffing and ultra-brutal drumming. The production is very similar to WITTR and such bands, but Abigail Williams brings their own elements into the mix with some nice classical string instruments and a more ethereal atmosphere. After the 11-minutes of ecstasy provided by the first track, “Radiance” keeps the decadent and Doom-ish atmosphere alive with inhuman vocals and crushing riffs.

“Elestial” nicely blends raw BM elements with some melodic Doom-like passages achieving a very distinctive sound. We love how the track nicely mellows out around its end allowing it to transition into the very interesting “Infinite Fields of Mind”. In said track, the build-up sections are nicely rewarded with very well crafted and aggressive culminating points. The vocals are just superb and give that raw feeling that only a few bands can pull-off without sounding very shitty (like kvlt bands do). The guitar riffing is very diverse and changes from your typical BM riffs to more of the stuff Abigail Williams showed off in the last release.

Our favorite track is the monumental (and 17-minutes long) closing track “Beyond the Veil”. Here, the band nicely starts things up in a very Doom fashion, even reminding us of bands like My Dying Bride and such. Then all of a sudden the landscape gets cloudy and the rawness of Black Metal makes its way, a very brutal and yet excellent transition. Just after the storm we get another section of calm featuring violins, once the riffing starts again the mood completely changes and stays on the melodic side of things. The excellent combination of violins, shrieks and brutal drumming is orgasmic, just like the rest of this very excellent song. Closing down the track we have another classical passage that is just the perfect contrast for such a devastating section.

We have to say that it has been a while we have heard a piece of music that is this impressive and that has made us replay it over and over for hours on end. “Beyond the Veil” and “Becoming” it-self showcase the maturity of Abigail Williams into a shapeless entity that manages to craft excellent songs one after another without sounding repetitive and formulaic. This by itself it’s an impressive feat and will surely not go unnoticed by Metal fans around the world. We are impressed with this release and we are putting “Becoming” in our early top 10 albums of 2012 list. Waste no time and get a copy of this masterpiece as soon as it comes out in January.

Release: January 24th, 2012

Country: USA