Wayfarer, American Gothic (2023)

 

By Jack Rafferty

“Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.”

—Paul Valéry

I’ve followed Wayfarer since their debut album, and I have always appreciated the niche they have carved out for themselves. While I think that, at times, their aesthetic and thematic elements have wandered into gimmick territory, for the most part this has not been the case. I am happy to report that American Gothic is their most fleshed-out, realized version of what they have cultivated since inception. 

The history of violence that they draw from seems completely obvious in retrospect as a prime topic for the genre, but Wayfarer have been the ones to focus upon it singularly. To commit so heavily to such a thematic rigidity was risky, but Wayfarer stuck to their guns, and it has paid off. 

I was especially happy to see that American Gothic expands Wayfarer’s sound in refreshing ways, maintaining that core of black metal, while deepening the atmosphere and sounds they were willing to experiment with. They have also reined in a lot of their format and have achieved a greater sense of focus and purpose. They are at their most melancholy, rasping, and ferocious here. 

It finally feels like they are capturing the essence of a complex and deeply bloody fragment in time, that like an open wound, never closed and has continued seeping into the lives that have descended from it. How does one stand upon the very earth that was made an unceremonious mass grave, how do you reckon with the presence of those bones? Wayfarer, in their own way, have been journeying to interpret the dreaming plain of blood, withering to this day in slow death, a legacy of slaughter that never ended, a hydra that with every new head it grows and grows a new face as well. 

While they certainly do not achieve what someone like Cormac McCarthy does in recollection of this hysteric, ravenous delirium, Wayfarer have finally achieved a confident voice with American Gothic. Their sense of storytelling, pacing, balancing elements of their sound, and of cohesion in their sepulchral vision, have never been stronger than they are on this album.