With 2010’s MMX being a dumping ground for a half-decade’s worth of WFAHM’s more sanitary leftovers, Voyeur, the fourth full-length from the German math-metalcore quintet, desperately needed to recapture that jerky, off-note momentum their earlier works produced.
Luckily for the Berliners, Voyeur has enough raw, sordid viscera amongst its tight, taut riffing and occasional dalliances with ghostly ephemera to remind listeners just what it was about this gaggle of Germans that piqued the more inquisitive end of the metalcore audience in the first place. The creepy, nervous strings WFAHM’s bloodily precise stabs of guitar seem to sidestep into are now part of a much wider effort by the band to disconcert, rather than the obtuse jazz workouts of past releases.
The fabulously unhinged Catacombae proves that it’s possible to achieve an awkward balance between stabs of near-mechanical, downtuned riff churn and out-of-nowhere passages of solemn, sickly sounding experimentalism. There’s something gloriously rotten at the heart of Voyeur, and WFAHM revel in that.
