It took a band from Colorado to invent what one might call the black metal of the Frontier. Wayfarer, an outfit from the Rocky Mountains, have made the mythology of the American West — its founding violence, its wide-open spaces, its painful memory — the material of a singular work, halfway between atmospheric black metal and western music. American Gospel pushes this cinematic vision to its conclusion.
The critics (an 84 average across eight reviews) hail the record’s narrative ambition and aesthetic coherence. They praise a writing that knows how to alternate detonation and recollection, the intrusion of acoustic instruments — dry guitars, ghostly saloon ambiences — and that end-of-reign atmosphere hovering over the whole.
Musically, American Gospel advances like a ride: the tremolos rub shoulders with near-folk passages, the blast beats give way to contemplative stretches where one seems to hear the wind sweep a deserted plain. The band tell of a mythical, fallen America, that of the pioneers and the massacres, and this narrative dimension lends the record a depth uncommon in the genre.
One may feel that the conceptual ambition sometimes weighs on spontaneity, and that certain tracks stretch beyond the necessary to serve the narrative. The record asks to be carried along, to accept its avowed slowness. But the immersion, when it works, is total.
Verdict: 8.5/10. An ambitious, evocative work that invents an unprecedented sonic geography and confirms Wayfarer among the most original voices of American black metal.
