Wooden Veil
Wooden Veil

THE REVIEW

Raw animalistic chaos.

You put the disc in the player and feel the earth rising, cracking under heavy, ritualistic, symbolic steps. You see the black sky dividing into clouds that can't be associated with any recognizable form, but with endless expanses of nothing. And then the blood, and the flesh, the teeth. There is a primitive, wild, fierce world in these ten tracks.

A debut self-titled album that stuns, released quietly in 2009 and immediately forgotten. Little or nothing is found about this mysterious group shrouded in deep mystery. A haunting band (still formed by non-emerging musical personalities, like the Japanese Hayano) and cryptic, that makes paganism the leitmotif of the entire project (worth noting is the ritual ceremony performed as a public event to launch the album), not so much in the religious aspect as in the imagination, in the total immersion (but not always so serene) with nature, with the grain, with one's own spirit.
But how does "Wooden Veil" sound? Once again I'm at a loss (I wonder why I always end up reviewing albums that are hard to describe). It sounds like a disturbing punch to the teeth, like a Japanese girl in a schoolgirl uniform who cuts you up with a scalpel and then takes you to the hospital and so on, opening a potentially endless cycle of suffering, like a gloomy forest where bears set traps for humans.

An album essentially indecipherable, unpredictable, extreme. It combines daring bucolic free-folk with chants from the underworld and even the darkest, catacombal, mournful drone. If the opening of the beautiful "Red Sky" seems to propose a primordial song form, the following "Shiverings" already throws you off. The journey to hell has begun. A hell that is beautiful and colorful like Terayama's films, populated by strange creatures, by freaks with Aztec masks. Noise and death echo in the marvelous "Gravity Problems" (which dangerously reminds of Current 93 era "Dogs Blood Rising") and the concluding "Church Scream". But the entire album is pervaded by this perpetual disease, this sonic obsession of returning to emotion, to impulse, to violence, to the heartbeat.

It is a sick, unhealthy, perverse, incredibly difficult album. And yet, little by little, you will realize how short it is. Because it gripped you, emotionally, so much. It threw you into the eye of the storm, and you didn't even realize it. You stayed there with your eyes closed in suspension, with the terror of a catastrophe. And it doesn't matter if you're still on your armchair, something happened.
And perhaps, as happened to me, you will immediately, masochistically, repeat the listening.

One of the most beautiful albums I've listened to this year.
Obviously, after the release of the aforesaid, now four years ago, Wooden Veil disappeared and published nothing more.
They must have lost themselves among the clearings, among the plants, the orchids, to scamper with their masks and howl at the moon, bare-chested and with thighs stained with mud.

And here I am still on the same armchair, once more, listening to it again.