Wowahwala

By far the best album of 2023

2023 as been an awesome year for black metal. There's been so much great release by both famous and underground band through the hole year, and "Wowahwala" is one of them. This release is so good that after a year and a half of absence on this website, I felt I had to come back and try to make this album a bit more known. Let's take a closer look to this album from the American band Mahpiya Luta.


Firstly, the good points. One of the best aspect of this album is the riffs. Fuck sake, it's 34:59 of killer riff one after the other without pause. The song "Wacantognaka" is the best example here. Honestly, it's difficult to describe the feeling of these riffs. As you have probably noticed, it's an American native people band, more precisely people from the Lakotas tribe, Mahpiya Luta (red cloud in Lakota language) being one of the most influent Native American chief. This said, you can feel the native music style influence on their black metal. The guitar riffs are literally a Native American music lesson. I found the highly present influence of this kind of music into their black metal completely awesome. This type of riffs are adding some ambiance on this album who are comparable to absolutely nothing. Some people have called the type of riff that they are using as black'n'roll, but I hardly disagree with this. I don't see any rock'n'roll influence here, only native American like music influence.

In the eponym song, you feel transported into the Far West era, when the Native American strongly and courageously fought the invader and I think that's the aspect of this album that made me that much fall in love with it. In fact, you feel these ambiance during the hole album, but this song does it better than the others. This full-length gives off so much emotion through the violence of raw black metal, I found it extremely beautiful. I really wish I could read the lyrics to feel the beauty of this piece of art as a whole.

Otherwise, the bass is really really good. It complete perfectly the guitar and it's original, it does not play the same thing than the guitar during the hole album and it brings some very nice nuance to it. The drums are pretty basic, but they do the job perfectly. The vocals are also very good, the technique that the guy is using perfectly fit with the type of black metal they are doing.


To conclude, I would, like I rarely do, qualify this album as perfect. It's one of the very few album that I don't find any point that could have been improved or added, it's just perfect as it is. This beautiful tribute to one of the greatest Native American warrior is a total masterpiece that exceeds every other album released this year. I love every second of this album, and I really think we could qualify this album as one of the best of his genre. Not paying attention to this album would be a big mistake. I hope you will like this album as much as I do.


Cordially,

Warblackmetal666