Don't Wake The Trees

 

Another band that I discovered last year and was mightily impressed by was Danish darkness dwellers The Woken Trees. Their video for 'Yells' is a ominous creepfest of lush occult annihilation, and it makes for an utterly hypnotic video. I love it, and in case you missed it last time around, here it is again.

   

Well it's finally time for the arrival of NNON, the six-piece's debut record, and it's every bit as dark, visceral and gruelling as their single led us to believe. From the crunching electronic squall of the opening ten seconds of 'Orders', the relentless bass and guitar line, it's an exercise in tightly coiled tension, playing off post-punk rigour with an insistence of an industrial nihilism that is both terrifying and alluring in equal measure. 'Yells' is still the best song to stand out here, but the twilight pagan folk of 'Holy Water', the nightmarish march of 'Children of Chalk' and the majesty within the shadows of 'Half Hollow' make for electric listening. You get a feeling that if Interpol were less interested in Joy Division and more interested in Wire, Einsturzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle, they may have ended down this post-industrial hellhole of a route.

  

 Pre-order NNON through Pad & Pen Records here.

The Woken Trees - Yells
The Woken Trees - Holy Water

Yells Have Woken The Trees

 

I received this video clip in the inbox last week from Danish label Pad & Pen Records (responsible for the Beardy Durfs who I posted about a few months ago). It’s by a band called The Woken Trees. I know very little about them other than they are a six-piece from Copenhagen. Now Copenhagen are killing it at the moment, so that piqued the interest straight off the bat. Then I watched the video for ‘Yells’ - and it’s disturbingly brilliant. I felt like I was listening to a darker, more visceral version of Ben Wheatley’s stellar 2011 film Kill List, but in song form. The clip itself – which includes bleeding, bondage, drownings, hooded men and a pig’s head roasted over ritual fire – complements such a paganistic abomination perfectly. Then the fact that ‘Yells’ was written in half an hour, start to finish, is the final piece of the mystical puzzle – there are dark arts at play here.

 

‘Yells’ is on a 7” with B-side ‘Holy Water’ soon. The Woken Trees won’t have an album ready until January next year. Get your sacrificial altars ready…