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.

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.