Stagnant Waters – Stagnant Waters (2012)

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With another thought provoking and totally weird release, Norway’s Advesum label brings us Stagnant Water’s self-titled debut release. In this album we have a total eight deranged musical Avant-Garde compositions that mix Industrial, Black Metal, Electronic, and Jazz elements in a very unsettling, but yet intoxicating way unlike anything you have heard before. The only band that can somewhat compared to Stagnant Waters might be the excellent Shining from Norway and their furious “Blackjazz” release.

Opening with the Punk-ish Black Metal “Algae”, one might be steered towards thinking this release will be more like this… but one cannot be more wrong by thinking this way. There are a few furious Industrial and electronic elements in this track that immediately shift the focus of the song to a deeper (and weirder) direction. The band pretty much starts going ape-shit after the first 2 minutes with intricate expressions of weirdness and extreme brutality. “ССАЕР ЦНАПЯЛ ПНОИ ТАТ” brings some Diabolos Rising/Mysticum antics into the mix, but they are immediately outperformed by some weird/creepy clarinet and piano sections.

With Svein Egil “Zweizz ” Hatlevik doing the vocal work in this release, you know you can expect some very weird stuff to be going on in terms of music. The percussions usually go one direction and the sporadic BM riffs are just weird sounding and oddly placed in tracks like “Of Salt and Water” and “Castles”. The one thing we love is that the band does have a general direction and things don’t feel lost or out of place, they are just very odd and unexpected.

“Axolotl” is probably the most representative track of this release since it seems to combine all the madness of this release in a 10 minute epic. The song seems to travel between aggressive sections to more complex and odd combinations of keyboards and electronics passages. With a very improvisational feeling, this track is actually our favorite one of the album. Closing things off with the Jazzy/Nintendo-ish “From the Breaking Neck to Infinity”, we can’t help but wonder what goes through people’s minds when they come up with ridiculously crazy music like this, and why it is that we enjoy it so much.

Stagnant Waters indeed delivers one of the weirdest and yet interesting sounding albums of 2012. With this self-titled debut release they have set the bar quite high for themselves, but we are sure that another studio session with all the members tripping on some shrooms and/or acid, will surely produce another amazing release like this one.

Band: Stagnant Waters Album: Stagnant Waters
Label: Adversum

Release: October 29th, 2012

Oficial Site myspace

Genre: Avant-Garde Metal

Country: France / Norway

Rating: 89/100
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