Ov Hollowness – The World End (2013)

The Epic Post Black Metal Canadian outfit Ov Hollowness brings today a hefty dosage of piercing riffs and crushing vocals with “The World End”. For the duration of the 10 tracks in this release, this one-man band manages to socially abuse the listener with punishing guitar work surrounded by an excellent atmosphere and very well paced melodic headbanging sections. If you are a fan of guitar driven Black Metal, this is one release you don’t want to miss.

Immediately blasting away with “Abstractive”, the band immediately reminded us of bands like Agrypnie that push the boundaries of the genre by taking it to different directions. The guitar work is not your typical tremolo-picking abuse festival; it is more centered and melodic allowing the melodies to flow better while maintaining a very brutal and crushing sound. There are also tracks that are quite aggressive for the more purist fans of the genre, and they can be nicely sampled with “Grey”.

The hypnotic “Hoarfrost” is one of our favorite tracks since it has a very slow progression and killer guitar leads, one can even go as far as saying that it has a nice Doom vibe. One of our favorite tracks in this release is the excellent “Ov”, a track that delivers waves of catchy riffs and harsh vocals in a very well-paced environment. For the fans of Primordial, “The World Ends” delivers 10+ minutes of very similar guitar driven Black Metal.

The clean vocals of songs like “Lost Resolve” (and many others) add that extra ethereal/creepy vibe to the music, allowing Ov Hollowness to not bore the listener with just harsh screams. As Agrypnie, Ov Hollowness brings the heat when needed in super-fast and aggressive tracks like “Hollow”, but they also keep their vey sonically pleasing signature sound while doing so. “End in View” is another fine example of Doomier Black Metal in a very well delivered pace and filled with catchy melodic passages.

Overall, we love it when bands are not afraid of pushing the boundaries and we get releases like “The World End”. Being very aggressive and melodic at the same time, is something that most Post-Black Metal bands strive and Ov Hollowness has achieved it perfectly in this release. While other Post-BM bands are going into weird directions (Alcest, etc), we are fascinated by the ones that keep the raw emotion and brutality of the music in their core, but explore more melodic avenues. We can’t recommend this release enough for people that like the more unconventional side of Black Metal.

Release: March 18th, 2013

Genre: Post-Black Metal

Country: Canada