4 out of 5

Label: Season of Mist

Produced by: Matt Talbott

The RIYL hyper sticker-writer nailed it this time: 16 Horsepower and Young Widows: take David Eugene Edwards soulful howl and his groups’ doom-folk strum, and pair it with Young Widows low-end thumping post-punk brawl… but then stop thinking about those references after a couple songs in to Wailin Storms’ The Arsonist, realizing that the band owns their own piece of the brooding, gothic rock sphere.

If I am going to compare, I’d say that, album by album 16HP (and later Woven Hand) and YW both tend to have moved in phases during their relative careers; WS, meanwhile, covers a lot of those phases in one, synchronous album, and sometimes across a song: there’s blazing, hardcore-adjacent menace, such as on opener Dead End; you get more open-ended menace on paced tracks like followup Heart of Mind; moments of punk rock fury on Never Rest; and late-night ambient acoustics, such as on closer It’s All Dark Now Where Your Eyes Used To Be. These songs lead effortlessly from one to the other, though each maintain their own musical identity.

…If not exactly lyrical identity. While lead vocalist Justin Storms’ lyrics are actually really evocative – finding a balance between loose, vibe-based imagery and precision – excepting Never Rest’s pissed off anti-war stance, most of the songs dance around similar all-life-is-sadness themes, such that that imagery begins to cross over from song to song. And not in a way that necessarily feels thematic, more, like, this is all this dude thinks about.

That said, Storms’ delivery can range from haunting to feral, and even if topically repetitive, the lyrics taken as a whole are very effective. Set that next to the group’s ability to flex between brutal guitar slaughtering, NPR-ready thoughtful gloom, and just-when-you-want-it riffage, and you’ve got an album that secures name notoriety for Wailin Storms in your collection, and surely a repeated spot in your playlist for The Arsonist.