Review by Frost on December 25, 2021.

Seven years is a long time. Lots of things happen in seven years. People are born, people die, life carries on. But if there's one thing that's unchanging, it's the knowledge that we will all one day die and rot in the ground. Our consciousness will cease to be forevermore and there's not a thing anyone can do to change that. Death is a part of life and it is essential to keep balance in the world. Craft embraces that ideal with strong conviction and seething contempt and a bitterly cold venomous tongue

White Noise And Black Metal is definitely an interesting album for these Swedish black metal vets, continuing seven years after where Void left off. I'm not knowledgeable on Craft or how they take the Swedish black metal sound and contort it and bend it to their palate. I imagine with album titles like Total Soul Rape and Fuck The Universe, they play more to the Marduk or Setherial crowd: uncontrolled, manic, on-the-fringes blasturbation all the way through where unending, red hot, misanthropic hatred for the human species with a dash of anti-Christianity and Satanism is all you need. Not that I've got a problem with that style of black metal. I'm okay with it in bursts, but I cannot listen to it all day. I need a little atmosphere, maybe something slower. Break up the pace with some Burzum or Cold Northern Vengeance. Going in and expecting to hear that, I instead came away with almost the exact opposite. I came away with something dark, bleak, gloomy, and misanthropic with a lot of groove and an almost patient slowness in some parts.

Like I said, Craft is new to me but, like with a lot of bands, I've heard of them before through brief mentions or references through articles, videos, reviews, from other metalheads in passing, and so on and so forth. This album is a genuine first impression of their work for me. I bought the album from Season of Mist's website, so I feel obligated to listen to it now. I mentioned groove in the last paragraph. There is a LOT of groove, and normally when there's this much groove on a black metal album, I tend to get disinterested. On the contrary, though, Joakim and his crew seem to maintain the extra parts that feel like something from the pages of swing and make them feel no less threatening than the traditional blasting moments on here, which are surprisingly not in great supply for a band like Craft. A lot of mid-paced and outright slow moments dominate this album. The instrumental 'Crimson' is a prime example, maintaining the same solid beat until the end. 'YHVH's Shadow' and opener 'The Cosmic Sphere Falls' both have a fast pace, but I'd say the opener is the only real track on here that will throttle you to pieces with your own intestines before it pumps the breaks going forward. 'YHVH's Shadow' slows down a couple minutes into it and does a great job filling the remaining minutes with awesome moments, like the bass rumbling very deep over the guitars, throwing out riffs that give that section a bluesy feel. Yes, sir, I said that. Blues meets black metal. At least for that one song. But it sounds good, though.

Before going into this album, I though I had a clue of what to expect. The first time listening through, I was utterly confused. After a few more listens, this album is a grower. A lot of the catchier moments here (and they are not in short supply) really stick with you like the second track 'Again', which breaks into this absolutely chugging swinger of a riff that is super awesome to listen to. Even though it leans heavy on the groove, it still feels very black metal. Same thing applies with 'Darkness Falls', which screams black 'n' roll to me. However, that's in no way a jab against Craft because, once again, they pull it off spectacularly. Like Cloak with their debut album last year, which was very much a black 'n' roll album, they make the two styles work to their advantage.

I don't really have any issues that could be considered major enough problems to seriously hurt the rating I'm giving it. I think this is a damn good black metal album, one of the best BM releases of 2018 so far. If you're a huge lover of black metal, you owe it to yourself to pick this thing up.

Rating: 9.2 out of 10