Review: Woe – Legacies of Frailty

Skeletons silhouetting the once luminous but now faded crepuscular of humanity’s accomplishments. Soulless drones lost to technology and dead to the cause… Worthless and doomed to fail us all as tomes of yesteryear are reopened; their familiar spells cast once more – in rue of evolution and development – curses to bring forth Dystopia. An unsavory history erased and transgressions revolving back around like ancestral curses. There is no hope. Not for you, nor for I as our tomorrow hangs in the balance. The scales? Quivering within the weakest and the most unprepared of hands. The future awaits! A most inglorious one… No one will sing our praises, for these are the “Legacies of Frailty”.

Woe is an American black metal project out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that was originally formed as a solo venture by multi-instrumentalist Chris Grigg. The project quickly grew into a full lineup and, under the Woe moniker, a total of five LPs have been released; all of reputable status and fine enough representations of a thriving USBM movement. Their latest foreshadowing comes in the form of “Legacies of Frailty” – released on September 29 via Vendetta Records – a fresh outlook upon an age-old truth: history repeats itself…

The album

With “Legacies of Frailty”, Woe admonish the ways of old and brings to the threshold black metal of the contemporary variety. How fitting. After all, it’s our FUTURE that is doomed, and this vision of dissension snowballing into a state of global collapse is a bit more than your typical end of days-signaling BM record. This concept is worn and has been explored by many of the genre’s renowned legends of the scene, so there’s not a lot to be impressed over when it comes to conceptualization. But what the recording lacks in innovation, it valiantly substitutes with soul: “Fresh Chaos Meets the Dawn” and “Scavenger Prophets” – a temped tandem of rites – each cut aglow with a soft kind of warmth that emanates through a canopy of slow-burning melodic sequences and swells of ascending upon descending tremolos. Proper tone set and onward into a new Dark Age we go… only to discover more of the same and not much else.

From underneath scarce but impactful atmospheric elements and dreamlike progressions – like the deepest part of the river as it creeps along almost unnoticeably at flow – so too shall Woe continue to overwhelm you with stock black metal riffs and lazy cadences in service to a none-too-engaging or unique vocal contribution. One-dimensional and without variation, even through some of the album’s up-tempo passages in tracks like the closer “Far Beyond the Fracture of the Sky”. Where has this energy been? Capping things off nicely here with a little something called energy in this too-little-too-late effort of a finale.

Conclusion

The end is nigh! And to it, we progress a little more each day. Dumber; oblivious to what’s become a worldwide rash of absurdity spreading like shingles over wisdom forlorn. A theme admirably explored but without the proper soundtrack. It would be a slight to call “Legacies of Frailty” a “bad album”. It’s like the old saying goes: “I wouldn’t kick her out of bed”. Furthermore, it’s got its moments, and it’s a well-packaged product, but overall, well… “Legacies of Frailty” is boring. Like if Ben Stein wrote a black metal album. Hyped up and even celebrated by many it seems is this latest effort, but I’m a man of many sweet spots and “Legacies of Frailty” missed nearly every one of them.

6/10

Experience “Legacies of Frailty” by Woe right here as presented by Black Metal Promotion:

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