Posts Tagged ‘Doom’

Thou – Magus

Posted: 15 August 2018 in Albums
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Sacred Bones Records – 31st August 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

Magus is Thou’s first full-length since 2014’s Heathen. It’s perhaps fair to say that the three EPs which preceded it – which they forewarned would be ‘a complete sonic departure from Magus and from each other’ – which effectively constituted albums in their own right – did nothing to prepare us for this.

But what exactly is this? As the album’s press blurb acknowledges, they’re ‘often lumped in with New Orleans sludge bands like Eyehategod and Crowbar, [but share] shares a more spiritual kinship with ‘90s proto-grunge bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden’, while ‘the band’s aesthetic and political impulses reflect the obscure ’90s DIY hardcore punk found on labels like Ebullition, Vermiform, and Crimethinc’. All this makes them hard to place.

The album’s opener, ‘Inward’, provides just over ten full minutes of snarling fury that carries enough weight to crush weaker souls who may venture forth expecting any of the soft musicality of the Inconsolable EP (which revealed Thou to be capable of extreme gentility, and, indeed, extreme beauty).

Things turn very black and very sludgy and very heavy on ‘Transcending Dualities’; and while it’s a snarling, low-tuned mess of slow-creeping sludge, there are stray notes that break free to squeal to break the trudging oppression. Bryan Funck’s twisted vocals draw every ounce of excruciation into the mix.

‘The Changeling Prince’ brings grace and grandeur to proceedings, and the hushed intro and expansive sound of ‘Sovereign Self’ (the second of three songs to cross the ten-minute mark) calls to mind Amenra, but his is a whole other level of gnarly, demonic savagery, and the overall sonic density is suffocating.

But Magus does find Thou continue to expand and explore in all directions, and there are three shorter tracks that serve as interludes between the towering monoliths which are the songs themselves: the cacophonous racket of ‘My Brother Caliban’ contrasts sharply with ‘Divine Will’, with its ethereal female vocals and pounding tribal drums. Elsewhere, the sprawling epic that is ‘In the Kingdom of Meaning’ introduces a psychedelic twist to the doomy trudge. And there are passages of extreme delicacy, rich in evocative atmosphere, which draw the lister into quiet clearings with dappled light where an air of calm radiates before the shadows loom, the clouds gather and the next tempestuous storm breaks. Such tension-building passages and contrasts of mood and volume create a compelling dynamic and makes Magus a mighty album which requires attention and exploration of the detail.

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Drug Cult – Drug Cult

Posted: 9 June 2018 in Albums
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Ritual Productions – 21st June 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s perhaps fitting that self-professed occultist doom collective Drug Cult should unveil their debut long-player to coincide with midsummer’s day and the solstice.

They open with a nine-minute sludge-trudge that’s bursting with the trappings of psychedelia and old-school hard rock: ‘Serpent Therapy’ starts so slow, with so much distance between each chord that it sounds like an ending, a protracted grinding to a halt, rather than the start. Yes, this is slow, and this is heavy. The guitars are close to collapsing under their own weight, and threaten to bury Aasha Tozer’s reverb-drowned vocals in the process. It’s the soundtrack to a bad trip into the underworld, and while there’s nothing of such epic proportions to be found during the remainder of the album’s nine tracks, the darkness remains all-pervasive.

There’s a classic, vintage quality to the songs, but it’s all sludged up, twisted and messy, and what the songs lack in duration (the majority are below the four-minute mark) they more than compensate in density. The riffs lumber slow, low, and heavy, the bass grinds just as slow and even lower: the percussion doesn’t propel, but instead lands in thunderous ricochets while the cymbals wash in tidal waves. In fact, it’s like listening to an early Melvins 45 at 33, save for the vocals, which never sound anything less than borderline deranged.

The sense of volume is immense, speaker-shredding, earth-shattering. And just when it doesn’t seem possible to drive any deeper, grind any lower, ‘Bloodstone’ reaches a new low in low, the essence of doom-laden hard rock riffing distilled to its absolute. The form is still apparent: Drug Cult don’t take it beyond the limits as Sunn O))) do, but against contemporaries like Esben and the Witch and Big Brave, Drug Cult stand out for their concision and their eschewing of passages of levity: this is unforgiving, ultra-heavyweight from beginning to end. As such, it’s a truly megalithic work. Worship it.

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Chrch – Light Will Consume Us All

Posted: 6 April 2018 in Albums
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Neurot Recordings – 11th May 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

The band’s biography locates them as ‘standing at a crossroads of light and dark’, and we learn that Chrch create ‘epic, lengthy songs, with a massive low end, and a supernatural vocal presence, in a perfect blend of height and depth’.

Epic is the word: this, their second album contains just three songs, the shortest of which is just shy of ten minutes in length.

It begins with the twenty-two minute behemoth that is the appropriately-titled ‘Infinite’. Slow-picked notes, bathed in chorus and reverb hang in suspension. Dust motes drift in the spaces between them, and time stalls in a freeze-frame. Gradually, the percussion begins for form rhythm in the background, and some semblance of form begins to emerge. It’s around the five-minute mar when the dual vocal – a banshee howl and chthonic growl – tear through a landslide of trudging guitars so slow and low as to be positively subterranean. The mid-section is delicate as a butterfly’s wing, before the second heavyweight segment proffers forth some kind of doom rendition of classic rock, like Clapton on Ketamine, multiple lead guitar lines intertwining at a fraction of the conventional tempo.

‘Portals’ focuses more on the infinite power chords, screeding feedback, bowel-shaking bass and screaming demon vocals. It’s the soundtrack to a descent into the infernal abyss. The trudging riff that dominates the second half is enlivened by a majestic lead part and Eva Rose’s captivating vocals which soar and glide magnificently. I shan’t deny it: I’m a sucker for a shoegaze voice pitched against slabs of guitar as heavy, grey, and grainy as basalt.

The final cut ‘Aether’ is by far the lightest and most uplifting in its tone, and pushes further into shoegaze territory, despite its agonizing 40bpm pace and the anguished screams in the background. It feels like a crawl toward the light at the end of the tunnel, and despite the thunderous weight and the howling agony which permeates every note, it feels somehow redemptive.

The heavy passages – and they’re seriously heavy – are broken by protracted periods of tranquillity, of mesmeric beauty and delicate grace. But, truth be told, the format’s growing tired, the tropes of the dynamics embedded to the point of predictability now. And so it all comes down to execution and the details. On Light Will Consume Us All, Chrch venture – subtly – into different territories, territories which exist beyond the template of what’s now the doom standard. And it’s well executed. Really well executed.

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Hundred Year Old Man – Breaching

Posted: 20 March 2018 in Albums
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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.

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Hundred Year Old Man – Rei (EP)

Posted: 1 January 2018 in Singles and EPs
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Gizeh Records / Wolves & Vibrancy Records – 26th January 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

With the follow-up to ‘Black Fire’, Leeds doom behemoths threaten to go ‘even further into the abyss’ with this three-tracker, built around two towering monoliths. And while they continue to mine the seam of bone-crushingly heavy sludge showcased on their debut release, this new offering vastly expands the territory and reveals new depths, new range, and a real appreciation of texture and tonality.

‘Sun & Moon’ begins gently, an atmospheric drone evolves to a swirling sonic mist. The beat is sedate. And then the first power chords tear through it all and shred it to obliteration. The mangled, grainy metal overload, booming bass, and the gut-wrenching vocal combine to devastating effect, and the contrasts accentuate the power of the seemingly opposing elements as they pull not apart, but together, surging in sonic tidal waves. The track calls to mind Prurient in the way soft, graceful notes – the synths border on shoegaze as they wash and ripple lines of melody – are juxtaposed with truly savage noise and violent abrasion, making for six and a half minutes of compelling and hyper-intense listening.

Intensity isn’t all about duration, through, and while Hundred Year Old Man are very much an act for whom the expansive is their favoured territory, they prove here that they’re equally capable of condensing the force and atmosphere into more succinct compositions. ‘A Year in the North Sea’ may be but an interlude piece, but with dense, rumbling towers sound building around swelling organs and soaring choral voices, it forges drama on a scale of Karl Orff’s ‘Oh! Fortuna’, before twittering birdsong is carried into the distance on a solar wind.

All of this is just prelude, however, to the title track, the nine-minute ‘Rei’, a work of crushing weight and monumental enormity in every dimension. While the Neurosis comparisons are as just as they are inevitable, the mid-section locks into a bass-driven loop that grinds like Swans circa 1984, battering at the senses and bludgeoning the listener with brutal repetition and an overwhelming density of sound. Paul Broughton’s voice is a raw-throated howl of infernal anguish, the lyrics inaudible and impenetrable, but the delivery conveying more than mere words ever could, articulating a primal pain.

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Hundred Year Old Man – Rei (EP)

Ghold – Stoic

Posted: 22 October 2017 in Albums
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Crypt Of The Wizard – 3rd November 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

2015’s Of Ruin was a sludgy, doomy epic of monumental proportions, and its successor, PYR (2016), which saw them expand to a three-piece heralded the arrival of a more expansive sound. Stoic signifies a further evolution, and feels like their most focussed work to date. This means that there’s nothing quite as vast as the 21-minute ‘Desperate Thrang’ on Stoic. Nevertheless, it’s an album of immense scope and equally immense weight.

Opening with the nine-minute ‘Nothing Dreamt’, Ghold intensify both the droning doom and the heavy psychedelia of their previous outings. The vocals, low in the mix and drenched in effects, swirl amidst a backdrop of guitars as thick as slow-crawling lava. The thunderous riffology is balanced with extended passages of nuanced atmosphere which are delicate, even beautiful, as elongated drones drift into ambience.

‘Ruptured Earth (Head in Sand)’ brings both pace and volume, showing that Ghold haven’t lost sight of their thrashy roots, but have instead honed their sound into a glorious hybrid that’s uniquely theirs.

‘SKHUL V’ brings the heavy trudge, its ultra slow, ultra low sludgefest reminiscent of early Melvins. The percussion is immense, with light years passing between beats. It bleeds into the raging tempest that opens ‘SKHUL VI’, a frenzied and sustained sonic attack. It shudders and burns, and by the four-minute mark has achieved an optimal throb before gradually disintegrating, collapsing in on itself. It’s twelve-minute duration is a succession of cycles, a slow, grinding riff emerging from the howl of feedback only to become buried, lost in a vortex of its own slowing tempo, re-emerging at last as a crawling slice of glacial, minimal jazz.

If the whole deal sounds a shade incongruous, it’s to the band’s credit that they make it work, and so seamlessly. Stoic isn’t just a solid album, it’s an incredible album that pushes further toward the reaches of categorisation.

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Watch: ‘Last Chance To Die Young’ by Regulus

Posted: 13 October 2017 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Following a triumphant set at HRH Stoner V Doom, space rockers Regulus have launched a video for their new single “Last Chance To Die Young”.

Drummer Joe Milburn says of the video: "’Last Chance…’ is our ode to rock and roll and all that is encompasses. From the masochistic sacrifices it requires to the ecstatic highs that fuel us down this path!"

Watch the video here:

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Chelsea Wolfe – Hiss Spun

Posted: 18 September 2017 in Albums
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Sargent House – 22nd September 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

Chelsea Wolfe is one of those artists who seems to continually grow with every release, and 2015’s Abyss was something special: a grand, powerful, and intense musical work that reached the parts other albums cannot reach. It’s fair to say that expectations for Hiss Spun were set high as a consequence.

As the accompanying blurb tells us, ‘the album was conceived as an emotional purge, a means of coming to terms with the tumult of the outside world by exploring the complexities of one’s inner unrest’.

Chelsea gets down to conveying this turmoil from the first bars: opener, ‘Spun’, is a throbbing deluge of dense, low-tempo, Godfleshy, bass-centric grind, a seething surge of low-end noise with an overloading, freewheeling lead guitar that’s not so much a solo as an out of control rollercoaster of fretwork that heaves and lurches every which way as if uncertain of its own direction but desperate to find a route to the end. ‘Particle Flux’ is also centred around a tectonic, subterranean low-end pulsation, and builds to a multi-layered, multi-faceted crescendo.

Single cut ’16 Psyche’ has the epic qualities of some of the strongest tracks from previous album Abyss – ‘Iron Moon’ in particular – and ‘The Culling’ repeats the trick of bursting into a crushingly powerful bloom from a quiet, delicate bud. But while nailing choruses of immense scale, these tracks also pound hard, sonically and emotionally.

Placing Hiss Spin side by side with Abyss is instructive: this latest work marks a considerable shift from the brooding industrial-edged gothic folk of its predecessor toward a much more metal-orientated sound that’s not only heavier and more abrasive, but more overtly challenging and confrontational. In fact, everything about Hiss Spun is more.

Following a heavy synth drone intro, ‘Vex’ brings blistering guitar dynamics and a shoegaze atmosphere to a twisted, reverb-soaked vocal that’s simultaneously emotion-rich and curiously detached. ‘Scrape’ draws the curtain with a dark, murky grind that’s as intense as it is dense, and Chelsea’s voice soars higher than ever, wracked with desperation. Thunderous tribal drumming blasts through the squalling guitars to render an imposing finale.

The production on Hiss Spun is immense. The percussion is enormous, every snare hit an explosion, every bass thump enough to trigger an earthquake or tsunami. Every beat, every note, strikes deep into the soul and drags at the deepest levels. To explain precisely how and why Hiss Spun resonates so deeply would be to ruin its magic: this is an album which connects subconsciously, subliminally, pulling as it does between fragility and fury, and with such stunning grace, and it drives, but as a slow pace.

Instrumentally, the dynamics are breathtaking. And never has Wolfe sounded so raw, by turns so fragile and so powerful, channelling emotions to utterly devastating and bewildering effect. Superlatives are inadequate: Hiss Spun is an album so strong as to be almost overwhelming and marks, my a mile, a new career high-point.

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Hundred Year Old Man – Black Fire

Posted: 22 August 2017 in Singles and EPs
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Gizeh Records (GZH77) – 25th August 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

‘Black Fire’ is the debut single from Leeds doom / sludge metal six-piece Hundred Year Old Man. The press release suggests it’s ‘the perfect introduction to the Hundred Year Old Man world’. It’s ten and a half minutes long.

It was actually recorded some time in 2015 or 2016 and first saw the light of day in February 2016, but it’s only now that it’s getting an official release. But then, with music like this, it seems only fitting for things to move at a tectonic pace. You can’t rush this kind of thing, and no, I’m not being sarcastic. When it comes to producing megalithic doom epics, there has to be a certain attention to detail, to structure, to tone. Because the way sound interacts with sound matters: at volume, notes resonate against one another, frequencies rub and reverberate and they have a physical and well as cerebral impact. Every moment on this monumental piece is honed to perfection, to achieve maximum sonic impact. Each shuddering power-chord hangs and simmers for what feels like an eternity, vibrating the ribs, the lungs, the colon.

As titles go, ‘Black Fire’ may well be a doom / sludge / metal cliché of the highest order, but by the same token, it sets an expectation that Hundred Year Old Man fulfil with consummate ease. It is, of course, the sound of beards and hoodies and tattoos.

And it’s a punishing, brutal trudge. The guitar sound is so thick, the bass sounds like the tearing of a corrugated cardboard box, and the weighty throb is completed with a nihilistic holler that’s more Godflesh than anything else that comes to mind. There are some well-placed changes of tempo that provide vital dynamics, and when they hit a groove it’s solid and hard. There’s a lot of promise here, and with a 12” EP threatened for early 2018, maybe they’ll get around to a full-length album before I’m a hundred myself.

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