Review: Culak – Wayfarer

Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 21st February 2025 With all the excitement about the new Wayfarer record coming out, I searched my inbox to see if I was lucky enough to get a promo (I wasn’t, dear reader) but I did find ‘Wayfarer’ the album by Texan one man post/black/doom project Culak out last year, an album that I enjoyed on previous listens but had erroneously never written about. Well, I’m going to do that now, because this is a record more people should be listening to. It is out now self released. Culak are remarkably productive, and in fact have released two albums since this but I don’t have those (yet). Opener ‘Refuge in the Inner Temple’ is glacially calm, an exercise in perfecting a slow burn, atmospheric build up over its first six minutes, before it swells into something heavier and more obviously black metal. Drifting piano melody accompanies this grim, atmospheric black metal and the music fades and swells again like an orchestral movement. Deeply melancholic, the…