Gizeh Records (LP/CD) / Wolves & Vibrancy (LP)
27th April 2018
Their BandCamp profile describes Hundred Year Old Man as ‘an Ambient Post-Sludge Metal band’. If this sounds like a strange, if not near-inconceivable combination of genres, what it all comes down to is the fact that this is some slow, heavy shit. Breaching is the six-piece’s debut album, and follows single release ‘Black Fire’ (which features here, along with ‘Disconnect’ from the same release) and the ‘Rei’ EP.
While there’s been a constant deluge of slow, sludgy metal that’s seemingly been increasing in volume in recent years, Hundred Year Old Man set their stall out early as a band keen to push the parameters, and with Breaching, they reveal the full range of their ambition and their capacity to conjure spectacularly heavy music with unusual range. So, while it is some slow, heavy shit, it’s not all slow, or heavy.
That range isn’t simply musical, tonal, textural, or about tempo – although they cover all of those bases – but, unusually for a band in their bracket, vocally. Yes, a throat-wrecking upper-range howl, strained and painful is the dominant delivery, which contrasts well with the general leaning toward an excess of distorted, low-end grind, but there’s more guttural growl in the mix and even moments of melody. And, for all of the overdrive and afterburn as mangled chords resonate for an eternity around the caverns of purgatory, there are moments of breathtaking beauty, shafts of light which beam from the heavens and illuminates a very different aspect of the doomy space the band create.
Against a droning, rumbling swell of sound, a distant voice howls in anguish: the title track makes for a lengthy intro that builds a dark smog. It isn’t until ‘Black Fire’ crashes in with its full-weighted guitar trudge and thunderous percussion, and the volume shoots up by at least fifty per cent that things really get going. And once it gets going, it keeps going, for eleven minutes. It’s ample time to deliver a whole world of crushing riffage.
It’s their use of dynamics that really make HYOM such a refreshing proposition: they’ve got so much more than a single template, meaning that while Amenra and Neurosis may be obvious reference points, they only provide a fraction of the measure of what they do, and Jesu could perhaps provide a valid touchstone also.
Muffled samples echo in quiet spaces and linger in the corners where shadows shuffle and linger among elongated drones and sustain sculpted into magnificent shapes. ‘Disconnect’ brings vaporous, shoegazey contrails of guitar which drift and drape over the slow-melting rhythm section before the overdrive kicks in, along with the anguished vocals.
Just short of four minutes into the nine-minute ‘Long Wall,’ the pace picks up and the guitar kicks into a juggernaut chugger riff, and a few bars later, the volume spikes and the whole thing thunders forward at pace. There’s an almost hardcore edge to the track’s battering drive and relentlessly angry thrust, but beneath the blistering assault, there’s grace and melody to be found in the layered guitars, scaling upwards to soaring cathedrals of sound in the closing couple of minutes.
The album’s final cut, the ten-minute ‘Ascension’ is a softer, more delicate – and ultimately optimistic and redemptive – composition that, despite the snarling, spat vocals, leads the way toward the light. It rounds off an immense and immersive hour which balances beauty and brutality to forge a quite specific niche in the sphere in which Hundred Year Old Man dwell.
AA
Aural Aggravation 