Book of Wyrms – Occult New Age
I am a hard to please music lover. With that being said, I never pass up the opportunity to listen to a new band. Sometimes, this is how I end up finding my favorite bands. Sometimes I find a diamond in the rough, so to speak, and I end up being pleasantly surprised and excited. When it came time for me to listen to the new album Occult New Age from Virginia’s Book of Wyrms, I was both curious and excited to see if they had grown at all from the last time I heard them, which was 2019’s Remythologizer.
I listened to Book of Wyrms’ Occult New Age, and I honestly have to say that I was unmoved and frankly bored after the first listen. For the second listen, I tried hard to focus on the songwriting, and like most bands/peers of Book of Wyrms’ era, there is zero originality to the album. The songs on Occult New Age lack creativity, but nothing is moving about these songs. There is no fire, no drive, and no attempt to captivate the listener.
The mix on this album has vocalist Sarah Moore Lindsey’s vocals buried in the mix, which doesn’t help her with what seems to be a lack of confidence and power. Lindsey, to me, comes across as a way less powerful and less confident version of Ruby the Hatchet vocalist Jillian Taylor. If there are stories to be told via the lyrics, those stories go unheard, making it even more difficult for me to listen.
From the ploddy Sabbath Worship (ugh…) and Caption Beyond riffs (which I have to say was relatively cool to hear), Occult New Age offers nothing substantial. The album has no consistent flow, which may be because all of the songs seem to run right into each other with very little (if any) diversity. Occult New Age offered me, the music listener, absolutely nothing of interest. Lindsey and the rest of her band sound like an uninspired storage room/rehearsal room/garage band.
Book of Wyrms has some talent, but I don’t find it the skill level to take them much further than the rehearsal room. If their goal is to try and make a mark on the world of this tired, beat-down genre of Sabbath Worship/Doom, Book of Wyrms fails to leave even the slightest blemish. Occult New Age, in a nutshell, is a collection of uninspired, passionless, and forgettable songs that will be forgotten long after the band is gone.
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