Southern Lord – 10th June 2016
Christopher Nosnibor
Holy fuck. You really need to brace yourself for this. That it’s on Southern Lord and Hissing are described as a Seattle-based blackened/death/ sludge behemoth is a starting point, and the fact the band features a guy called Joe O’Malley, who happens to be the younger brother of Stephen O’Malley gives an indication that it might be heavy… but holy fuck. I’ve (thankfully) never been hit by a truck, but I get the feeling that listening to this is a very similar experience. Yes, it hurts.
My research tells me that the lyrics of the new EP are ‘thematically centred around the effects of the metropolitan environment on the human psyche and explore themes of agoraphobia, urban decay, and incarceration.’ The lyrics aren’t immediately apparent, but the sentiment is conveyed in no uncertain terms, and with unstinting, brutal force.
‘Cairn’ may be an innocuous enough title for a song, connoting a pile of rocks built up by walker to guide others, but there is nothing friendly about this six-minute onslaught. The bass frequencies are everywhere: it’s not a case of the track featuring a hefty bassline but the speakers groaning under the density of the all-consuming bass frequencies which shudder the cones.
‘Husk’ is a similarly terrifying experience, dense, brutal and gnarly. But mere adjectives can’t come close to truly conveying the experience. ‘Dense’ is overused, not least of all by me, to escribe a thick, heavy, impenetrable wall of sound. Hissing create a sound that’s dense to the power of ten, so dense as to almost possess physical presence.
Aural Aggravation 