Black Sheep Wall - No Matter Where It Ends

Black Sheep Wall

No Matter Where It Ends

by Lior "Steinmetal" Stein at 29 March 2012, 11:41 AM

If this is supposed to be an out of body experience of what it is to look upon a drowning sorrow in the face, I didn't feel it. Maybe because I am playing with an idea that wasn't supposed to be there in the first place, maybe it is because it is my own perception. All in all, I think that I didn't trail the message that this album meant to provide. It is not that I am putting this on me or BLACK SHEEP WALL, which wrote the album "No Matter Where It Ends" that is in question, but through its bleak, pitch black moments it felt empty, dull, drone and I can't really think of any other adjectives that can describe the ongoing stillness that came over me while listening to the album. After I got to know bands like EYEHATEGOD, which pretty much tells the same stories, particularly with their line of Sludge Metal music, BLACK SHEEP WALL with their harsh motionlessness and monotone attitude kept me out of what this Metal subgenre has to offer.

Listening to Sludge Metal will probably send any Metalhead back to the arms of 70s oriented BLACK SABBATH and later on traditional Doom Metal outputs. I think that what the Americans did, along with their new wave of American Metal along with Nu Metal, to the well know classic Doom of the 80s, and may have savored the obscure atmosphere that comes with it. On the other hand, all the magic that lies in between just faded away, as if it was never there or gone with the wind BLACK SHEEP WALL started the album with the epic of "Agnostic Demon" that kept me in the dark with its inexplicable personality. The what seemed to be hollowed sound that enslaved the riffing had something interesting in it, yet after two minutes nothing changed, it remained still though the drumming shifted into a different pattern, also in slow tempo just as Sludge Metal has always been displayed. From this track, the way down looked clear with the boring "Liminality". However, like a wind of change, "Black Church" opened something up, like a crack in the band's shield as the song went into the outskirts of Nu Metal. Though I am no fan of this kind of Metal, it actually helped the song to go somewhere. With the highly soaring monotone grunts of Trae Malone the uncultivated plot continued to swarm while playing out to be similar to what I recognized as a melody. The bizarre "Torrential"continued the same blackish shape but it didn’t' progress far with its riffing to show signs of anything better than the previous one.

"Cognitive Dissonance" left me somewhat bowled over, the band actually wasted away nearly six minutes for sound effects that was annoying as hell. Within these bothersome scuffling and scratching of the brain, I presupposed that BLACK SHEEP WALL wanted to enhance the feeling of thinking process and its distortions, but six minutes really? Well not that the last remaining features tracks, especially the grand epic finality of "Flesh Tomb", which can't be even considered as a background track, were so fabulous.

"No Matter Where It Ends" proved to me that where everything ends does matter. I don't think that BLACK SHEEP WALL made a bad name of Sludge Metal, yet their release just wasn’t good enough as it adhered to boredom and lacked interest.