Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for Black Wound - Warping Structure (2023)

Swedish death/doom outfit Black Wound deploy a sludge metal-like production job on their debut full length.  Production values are low to say the least which if this had been a sludge metal record may have been less of a problem for me.  As it stands I feel they went a little too far on the extremity and inaccessibility of their sound in my opinion.  The reference point I would use here would be Primitive Man - only it works so much better for them.  The cavernous and unfathomable depths that Black Wound dwell in simply need more breathing space and as a result the album sounds compressed.

That is not to say that the record has zero positives as underneath the murk there is some lurching and at times rabid death/doom going on.  Unfortunately, the elements all seem to merge into one a lot of the time making Warping Structure the absolute epitomy of that album title.  It is not warped as such, just quashed.  Those riffs have a power that they feel somehow forbidden to express in the squally and chaotic mix.  The vocals probably come off best in the mix overall and are seemingly the only part of the album that I can track with any degree of success.  The drums sound like a "tishy" mess a lot of the time, occasionally breaking through the noise to show there is some attempt at rhythm going on here.

Now, this is an independent release and so I suspect it was self-produced also on the thinnest of shoe-string budgets imaginable, so some slack should be cut on Black Wound I suppose.  Whether intentional or not, Warping Structure misses the mark of being underground and comes off instead as sounding amateur.  Even my extreme metal grizzled ears can't cope with too much of this record and I can only hope that the promise hidden in the record is allowed to come to fruition on future releases.