Wayfarer: "Old Souls"

This band from Colorado creates some dark brooding metal makes you forget they are from the States. Primarily they strike me as being a blackened death metal band with the vocals leaning them more in the death metal direction. When the pace picks up a little toward the end the shadowy feeling reinforces the looming black metal influence, but over all there is just a great mood and atmosphere coating this death metal which gives your ears the impression of black metal. There is more of a strum to the interlude "Frontiers" which strikes as just the intro to "Old Souls New Dawn".  This song begins much more melodically, sure their are some moments that might make you think this is pagan or folk metal due to the more epic scale they build this upon, but the same could be said for Unleashed who is a death metal band.

The songs are all on the longer side, tipping the scales at over ten minutes, but this is time well spent. Things get increasingly melodic, but never drone or grow stagnant. "Catcher" has an almost accessible groove to it. The song swings with the drums sitting back in the pocket.  Two minutes in things switch up with a cleaner guitar part that the drums play around rather than locking in with, however in this case it works. They really cram so much into this four and a half minutes it makes me wonder if they needed to use all ten of those minutes on the first song. "Deathless Tundra" backs off a little allowing a spacious bleak melody to form. They build the tension and then let you glide over in a very progressive fashion. They song throbs and pulses more than it tries to beat you over the head with the riffs which works much better for me.

"The Dust Lakes" steers them more towards post-rock. The guitars sound great so I am not complaining. It works better than when they blast into "All Lost In Aimless Chaos". They songs hit some ebb and flow into clean passages like old Agalloch, but it is much more kinetic.I'll round this up to a 9, I am not sure I'll put it on the iPod, but will give it some thought. This is great death metal with a touch of other genres enough to give it a well balanced sense of dynamics, these guys have a great dark guitar tone.