Wolfpack 44 are an eclectic group of musicians from various other projects. The conglomerate features the likes of Riktor Ravensbruck (The Electric HellfireClub) and Julian Xes (Kult of Azazel) along with guest contributions from Lord Ahriman and Chaq Mol (Dark Funeral), Dana Duffey (Demonic Christ), Jinx Dawson (Coven), and Rev Thomas Thorn (also of The Electric Hellfire Club). Together, they form a cacophony of industrial black metal assembled from some scrapyard deep within the darkest corners of hell. But do these parts fit together?
The Scourge is a great idea in theory. Let's say that this album is a car we are constructing. Maybe we get some doors off of a Porsche, the body of a BMW, the engine from a Lamborghini, etc. Now sure, we are getting parts from some of the most respected cars and names in the industry...but how is this thing going to look?
Well, sh#t. Now don't take this to mean I am putting down the album entirely. It's just that as a whole it doesn't quite come together for me. We start strong with the HEAVY, chugging assault of the perfectly-titled "The Black March," then there are the great Ministry and Skinny Puppy influences on ""Dark Mountain," the utterly destructive vocal performances on "Chamber of Nightmares," and the very Rammstein sounding guitars on "The Enemy Below." Individually, each of these tracks are great and pull from some of my favorite corners of black and industrial metal. But once they start playing back to back, the album comes off as more of a mixtape then a cohesive album.
Focusing on strenghts, The Scourge definitely nails the vocals pretty much start to finish. Between the vile shrieks and more prophetic spoken word elements, Wolfpack 44 have it on lock. Also, there are a lot of great ideas being tossed around that are executed in unique ways. It's rare for me to see an album as not having some level of predictability, but these fusions definitely kept me guessing. I would just like to see the group pull together next time around and put more thought into the bigger picture. There is more than enough talent and creativty here to make one of the greatest industrial black metal albums the world has ever seen. We just need to move out of the scrapyard experimentation, take a look at what we took with us, and come up with a solid blueprint for a product that people will be beating down the doors to get ahold of.