SilentScream213 Might be controversial, but I’m of the opinion that Ved Buens Ende…’s best material was on their EP, Those Who Caress the Pale, and the tracks from there that made it here are the best. I’m usually not a huge fan of overly Avant-Garde stuff, but that EP was pretty much a perfect mix of Blackened Prog Metal with insanely quirky and disturbing Avant-Garde touches.

As to be expected, this album goes further into the Avant-Garde, focusing more on incredibly ominous and bizarre atmospheres, and the Black Metal plays second fiddle to the Avant-Garde Prog Metal. Songs change around in style, and interestingly there’s a lot of vocal variation here as well. The atmosphere is pretty great, a culmination of all things bad and ugly, captured very well in that unnerving album art. Don’t let my opening statement fool you; this is still an awesome record, and one of the best Avant-Garde releases of its time. However, it’s not as consistent as the EP, and the softer moments (like track 7) just don’t work as well as the heavy, ominous oppression. The hidden track is a weak way to end the album as well, though no weaker than the overlong outro on penultimate Remembrance of Things Past would have been.

UMUR "Those Who Caress the Pale" is a demo release by Norwegian avant garde extreme metal act Ved Buens Ende. The demo was originally released in 1994 on cassette tape but saw a CD re-release through Ancient Lore Creations in 1997. The re-release features the bonus track "Insects, Part I" and is probably the most readily available version. The demo led to the band signing with Misanthropy records for the release of their debut full-length studio album "Written in Waters (1995)".

At the time of the release of this demo, Ved Buens Ende consisted of Vicotnik (Dødheimsgard, Code, Manes, Naer Mataron) on guitars and vocals, Skoll (Arcturus, Fimbulwinter, Ulver) on bass and Carl-Michael Eide (Dødheimsgard, Aura Noir, Cadaver Inc, Infernö, Virus, Satyricon, Ulver) on drums, guitars and vocals. This was also the three-piece that recorded "Written in Waters (1995)".

Ved Buens Ende is a rather unique act with a unique sound that is both raw and aggressive but at the same time melancholic/atmospheric. The music sometimes reminds me of the most raw Voivod albums mixed with primitive black metal but with strange twist and turns and haunting deranged vocals.

Out of the five tracks on "Those Who Caress the Pale", "The Carrier of Wounds" and " You That May Wither" are also featured on "Written in Waters (1995)" but the rest are tracks didn´t make it unto the album. Both "A Mask In The Mirror", "The Plunderer" and the instrumental "Those Who Caress The Pale" are great tracks and should be of interest to fans of the band while the CD version bonus track "Insects, Part I", which consists of insect noises and tortured screaming and yelling for a couple of minutes before there is silence for about 4 minutes until the insects noises reappear, isn´t really much of a bonus to my ears.

The sound quality isn´t professional but the lo-fi sound production still suits the raw music well. All in all "Those Who Caress the Pale" certainly is a worthy purchase to fans of the band. Newcommers should probably start with "Written in Waters (1995)". A 3.5 star (70%) rating is warranted.

Warthur Ved Buens Ende put forth on Written In Waters a bizarre style of avant-black metal, reeling from genre to genre like the Norwegian corpsepaint crowd's answer to Mr Bungle. Able to lurch suddenly from esoteric jazz-metal noodling to furiously raw black metal rants - and, even more impressively, make this sudden shift sound perfectly natural - the band's sound lives up to the album title: anything you assert about their music is a statement written on water, true only momentarily and then rendered meaningless the next time their sound shifts. Latter-day black metal experimentalists who haven't heard this one already would be well advised to do so, because there's a long way to go yet before your average avant-black band manages to catch up with what these guys are up to.

Conor Fynes 'Written In Waters' - Ved Buens Ende (8/10)

Ved Buens Ende is a legendary band in the Norwegian black metal scene. Although not coming too far after the pioneers of the infamous second wave of Norwegian black metal, they had a sound that was vastly different, going down a much more experimental route, while keeping all of the same eerie atmosphere that makes the genre of black metal so appealing to some. Although this band eventually revived in the form of Virus, Ved Buens Ende only ever released this one full length, 'Written In Waters'. Although the career of this band may have been very short, it is massively influential, and seen as the album that largely laid the groundwork for avant-garde black metal. With that information laid down as a precedent, it is understandable that the music here is quite challenging to get into. However, there is method to this madness, and while I found myself having to revisit it many times to really 'get it', 'Written In Waters' is an exceptional piece of Norwegian metal.

Let it be said that Ved Buens Ende were years ahead of their contemporaries. Their sound is somewhat related to the more recent work of Deathspell Omega, and Blut Aus Nord. The point I should bring up is that those two bands made their mark even a decade after 'Written In Waters' was released. In other words, it was a real pioneer, doing things for black metal that were pretty uncomfortable at the time. Most of the vocals here are cleanly sung in a gloomy baritone, with only a few traditional black metal rasps to go around. The guitars are very percussive and dissonant, often alternating between very abrasive black metal riffs and sombre moments of dark psychedelia. There are plenty of echo and reverb effects to go around here, and gives the whole thing a very otherworldly feel.

The songwriting here is made even more challenging by the somewhat muddy production, which obscures parts of the sound to the point where a listener might even hear things that aren't necessarily there. As far as the writing here goes, Ved Buens Ende are masters of making melodies that can be plenty memorable, without necessarily being pretty or beautiful. Although a track like 'Autumn Leaves' gives the listener a respite from the darkness and frantic feel, these human moments are fairly few and far between. The majority of 'Written In Waters' revolves around strange, percussive textures, and a very bleak atmosphere. The vocals here are particularly distinctive, although they will certainly take some getting used to for some listeners. Czral's delivery is not aggressive, but it is unsettling, perhaps somewhat akin to Maniac's vocals on Mayhem's 'A Grand Declaration Of War', except much fuller in their sound.

The real jewel here are the less traditionally 'black metal' elements of this album. The speedy passages are energetic, but admittedly little more than what I would typically expect from a Norwegian black metal band of this era. However, it's Ved Buens Ende's vanguard experimentalism that makes the album so great, and keeps the music engaging despite its somewhat bumpy production.

Conor Fynes 'Those Who Caress The Pale' - Ved Buens Ende (6/10)

Although released officially in 1997, 'Those Who Caress The Pale' is a demo that predates Ved Buens Ende's full-length opus. It does seem somewhat redundant to hear this album after hearing the fulfilled vision of the band on 'Written In Waters', but as it stands, 'Those Who Caress The Pale' is a very good demo that shows plenty of the potential that the band would later go on to realize in greater detail. As anyone who has heard 'Written In Waters' can attest, the band has a very unique sound to them, one that twas years ahead of its time and much different from the typical Norwegian black metal that the band was surrounded with. While 'Written In Waters' makes quite a bit of the material here obsolete, there is thankfully enough stuff not yet heard to make this a worthy listen of its own.

Much of the music here is dominated by abrasive, harsh riffs and the decidedly un-metal crooning of vocalist Czral. Many of the songs here would later be re-recorded for 'Written In Waters', with musicianship and especially the vocal performance being tightened up for it. Here, I get the sense that the band is just as capable as they were on the full-length, but they were less meticulous about it, moreso wanting to get the music out, rather than focusing on the details. This shows, and much of this demo is muddy and obscured by a fairly thin production that some would say was typical of the black metal scene of the time. The standout tracks here are the same ones that managed to find their way onto the full-length, although for a Ved Buens Ende fanatic looking for a few extra minutes of dissonant riffing and maniacal vocals, this recording is far beyond what I would normally expect of a demo.