Beats and yelling: Kõdu

Kirjad sõgedate külastOut 25th April on Antiq Five years since their debut and a very different beast has wriggled free of the Kõdu moniker. Where ‘Unusta kõik’ unfolded a jagged, dissonant array of plodding black metal, at once surreal and haunting despite the cold, mechanistic approach, the long awaited follow up broadens the aesthetic spectrum whilst bringing a tighter conceptual unity. Kõdu are that rare thing in black metal, an artist able to toy with ambiguity via dissonance, a tangential momentum, and non-linear composition, yet at the same time furnishing us with an enthralling, immersive journey clasping at the spirit if not the form of classicalist black metal. Here the template has been updated. Idiosyncratic riffs abound, but they are now relegated to mere commentary, an antagonist to the central flow of the material, which pivots on a dynamic concoction of folk, prog, and psyche, stitched together with a defiantly traditional melodic core. This is a formula that shouldn’t…