An album of chilly, detached beauty.
If anything, it feels clearer, more focussed than its predecessor, much more honed. Here is a band with a direction, who knows what they're doing.
Wash the Sins Not Only the Face sees this U.K. trio mature and finally deliver on so much of the promise they showed early on.
Esben and the Witch have a little growing to tackle still. Although appealing in a fantasy-genre glutton way, the album feels a little one-dimensional.
Call it highbrow, call it highfalutin, but with ‘Wash The Sins…’, Esben are carving hulking tablets of stone boasting that intellect is nothing to be scared of.
Bathed in a sort of auditory night vision, 'Wash The Sins...' is definitely ominous and creepy sounding, without it ever being a gruelling listening-experience.
They haven’t quite found it yet, but Esben and the Witch have the potential for an arresting and momentous album in them.
The album’s perplexing textures and assured vocals, though, add density to the Brighton trio’s desolate mood and sinister themes.
There’s a lack of variety to the album that sees much of it merge together into a misshapen mush, which, it’s true could be ascribed to that production work as so much of the album is swathed in gauziness that suspicions start to form that it’s to cover up for material that’s gossamer-thin
Despite lacking the gonzo fun of Violet Cries the raw material itself is stronger.
Wash the Sins is not a logical, concrete progression from Violet Cries and the Hexagons EP, but a competent if ultimately unmemorable reiteration of a message that wasn't particularly strong in the first place.
Esben and the Witch seem stuck on an autopilot where any levity is out of bounds and an abyss beckons for all the wrong reasons.