September Malevolence - ...Accidents Happen So Fast

Omega Massif - Aura

The reference points for Patrick Walker's emotionally searing, purely melodic brand of doom metal are Justin Broadrick's Jesu project, Bob Mould's bleak rock (à la Black Sheets of Rain), and Michael Stipe's singing at his most nakedly confessional -- though he sounds like no one but himself. Walker's former band, Warning, released one of doom metal's classics in 2006's Watching from a Distance, which created high expectations for any subsequent project. The Inside Room doesn't disappoint. A trio fronted by Walker and featuring engineer William Spong on bass and former Warning drummer Christian Leitch, 40 Watt Sun deliver five songs (ranging from just under seven minutes to nearly 11) that draw on all of his strengths. His protagonists are tortured people; they're literally ripped apart by love, desire, the wish for deliverance, loneliness, and regret. He's unafraid to give them a clear voice, allowing their pain and vulnerability to give them dimension. The pace here is slow to very slow and the guitar is as pronounced as anything in the doom or metal genre, without all the jive, "evil for it's own sake" or faux gothic clichés for lyrics. "I can't see my way when shame is covering my eyes" are the opening words in the album's first track, "Restless." As Leitch's drums plod, accenting each sung line, Spong's bassline adds an element of danger to the clarity in Walker's voice. His guitar lines, from one snail-like chord to the next, reveal the coiled power of chaos that lies just under the surface of his character's frailty. The riff in "Open My Eyes" is spun out one layered, distorted string at a time, with well-placed rim shots and a steady thrumming bassline. The protagonist seeks to express his gratitude to his beloved, all the while seeking to pull her from sinking under the same emotional depths she's pulled him from previously. A subtle second melody creates another series of tensions as the singer finds himself powerless to help affect this change. "Between Times" is the most representative doom tune here, with its words "Carry me over between times/In your red room on quilted blankets/Laying awake in this low light." The gorgeous lyrics (printed in the booklet) are murkier on "Carry Me Home," wrapped in a blanket of fuzz and melancholic menace. "This Alone" is seemingly pastoral in contrast to the rest, but its twinned guitars and basslines underscore the funereal pace of Leitch's drums. It rings, on and on, seemingly forever, even as Walker's voice expends itself, professing love even as it expresses terrible loss and projects total loneliness. The Inside Room is almost monstrously great even as it pushes doom metal to its margins and over them. (via allmusic.com) 


40 Watt Sun - Restless

A post-metal/post-rock supergroup of sorts, Battle of Mice were a collaboration that brought together such wide-ranging artists as Made Out of Babies vocalist Julie Christmas, guitarist Josh Graham of Red Sparowes, former Pere Ubu and Bob Mould bassist Tony Maimone, drummer Joel Hamilton of Book of Knots, and drummer Joe Tomino. Formed after Christmas and Graham had met at SXSW while their respective bands were out on tour, the recording of their debut album was tumultuous, to say the least. Said album, A Day of Nights, was released in 2006 to critical acclaim in most post-rock and metal circles, even earning the number two spot in an Albums of the Year list in Decibel, a leading metal magazine. (via allmusic.com) 

Batte of Mice - Bones in the Water

Take a look at the figure on the cover of Longing, the debut from Seattle doom duo Bell Witch. Its eerie presence is appropriate for a record defined by inescapable haunting and loss. On these six songs, bassist/vocalist Dylan Desmond and drummer/vocalist Adrian Guerra play patiently, and sparingly; they appear to be carefully purging themselves of an inexplicable force corrupting their bodies. Instead of going for a frontal assault, piling riffs upon riffs upon riffs, they opt for something subtler, a spacious approach that affects the entire nervous system.
The album opens with a 20 minute journey into despair, "Bails (of Flesh)", a track that will likely weed out those who can't handle the unrelentingly downcast feel of the record. The tracks get shorter from there, but they also get sparser. Of note is "Longing (the River of Ash)", which grows more drawn out as it progresses. In this music of solitude, it's the loneliest track by far. Metal's defined by exaggeration, but the title Longing is perfect here: Desmond and Guerra want to go back to where pain didn't consume their reality.
A duo's primary challenge is to find a way to fill up space with minimal equipment. Usually, when a doom band's a two-piece, the guitars are double-amped and so downtuned that a bassist becomes irrelevant. Bell Witch flip this convention, employing a six-string bass in place of a guitar. (Often, one can hardly tell it's a bass.) Even lacking guitar, Desmond constructs melodies reminiscent of funeral doom acts like Skepticism and Esoteric, adding a touch of American dirtiness from his experience as the bassist of Samothrace.
There is one exception where the bass doesn't masquerade as a guitar. "Beneath the Mask", save for a sample from the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired film The Masque of the Red Death, is a five-minute drumless drone piece, where notes fly off and subsequently wither like Icarus on 33 1/3 RPM. The clean bass is more lonesome and more eerie than the distorted bass that the album's built upon. "Mask" seems like the perfect track to incorporate a sudden blast of hisses, feedback, screams-- something to make the listener jolt. It doesn't, and that suspense, like walking over rows of false trap doors, adds to the creepy atmosphere.
Throughout, Guerra's growls are complementary of the genre, and he even throws in a few blackened shrieks on "Rows (of Endless Waves)". Desmond's clean vocals, however, are more compelling, taking different shapes throughout the record. His warm, forlorn style carries the latter half of "Bails (of Flesh)", turning maudlin doom into perverted praise music. It's not a far stretch to imagine this being played in some church that worships self-destruction, congregants raising their hands up high, arms bleeding from cutting themselves. Desmond gives hails and salutations to the misery, like Om learning of a terminal illness diagnosis.
The previously mentioned "Rows" sees Desmond's voice become more delicate, almost crushing under the weight of the music. Frailty is important to the variety of doom Bell Witch explores, but rarely does a vocal performance capture what it is to stand on the line between sanity and madness. Desmond will whisper certain lines in "Rows", adding emphasis without raising his voice. He channels dISEMBOWELMENT's Renato Gallina on "Longing" making that track a true successor to the Australian doom-death quartet's 1993 classic Transcendence into the Peripheral. Remember that editorial arguing that metal vocalists are irrelevant? It wasn't entirely without merit, but Desmond challenges that line of thinking. He's got a cleverness and sense of space most vocalists don't possess. His voice is much like the music itself: it reverberates around, as if wandering and looking for a way out of this despair. Open and wide-reaching as it may be, there's also a sense of weighty claustrophobia in his voice, as if it's carrying his burdens, and the burdens of others, too. (via Pitchfork.com) 

Bell Witch - Rows (of endless Waves)

I fell upon Black Sheep Wall’s first record I Am God Songs by merely perusing Bandcamp. I was pleasantly surprised by their filthy sounding sludgy grooves and towering intensity. So of course I have been anticipating the release of their sophomore LP No Matter Where It Ends for some time now and I am sure a lot of you have been too. But does this new record hold up to the band’s debut offering?


The album opens up with dirty feedback that makes way for earth shattering sludgy guitars and completely filthy basslines on “Agnostic Demon”. This track is eight minutes of pure sonic intensity that will rattle what little brains you have left. The band definitely starts off strong. No Matter Where It Ends features some of the most ungodly heavy riffs known to mankind and combined with low end growls, it can be pretty terrifying. “Virtruvian God” is the only track on the record that is less than five minutes long and in its short one and half minute duration it pummels you with dissonant, slow building riffs that are sure to give you a heart attack. “Torrential” also features some deliciously nasty riffs that Neurosis and Eyehategod wish they would have written. But the album does feature some melodic moments to my surprise. “Liminality” and “Black Church” are extremely heavy and foreboding but they feature a lot of post-metal esque melodicism that make the tracks oddly beautiful at times. But let’s be honest, you’re not listening to this band to be lulled by gorgeous sounds. No, you’re listening to Black Sheep Wall to be wrapped in a rug of sludge metal and beaten to death with a hammer of pulse pounding, blood pumping riffs that can scare young children. No Matter Where It Ends provides all of this and more.

Great riffs aside, by the time I was half way through with this album I was drained. Six to eight minute long tracks of pure sludge can be extremely rewarding and cathartic. But some of the tracks on this thing become so repetitive and uninspired that they bored me to tears. “Personal Prophet” for is six minutes of spaced out chugging that leads nowhere and just sounds like the product of lazy, run of the mill sound writing. “Flesh Tomb” is another one that irked me to no end. It starts of pretty strong with these ridiculous heavy, dissonant grooves but around the halfway mark the band begins to repeat the same chugging section over and over for the rest of the song’s duration; which is twelve minutes by the way.

No Matter Where It Ends vomits a plethora of vile, thunderous riffs into your ear canals. Black Sheep Wall makes The Acacia Strain and similar bands look like a bunch of hacks. But while this album has a lot of delicious heaviness to offer, it fails at times to repetitive song structures and apathetic riffs. But this is just my opinion. What do you think? via: americanaftermath.net

Black Sheep Wall - Torrential

With Vision is the second full-length album release by Place of Skulls. The album was released in 2003 on the Southern Lord Records label. The recording of this album was marked by numerous personnel changes before the final staff was assembled. This is the only Place of Skulls album to feature Scott Weinrich (of The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan fame) on vocals and second guitar, as he left soon after to concentrate on The Hidden Hand. Writing credits are far more distributed among the band members than its predecessor, wherein all songs were written solely by Griffin.

Place Of Skulls - Nothing Changes

With their second full-length album, Boris takes their sludgy, Melvins-influenced doom rock style and gives it a heavy psychedelic slant. The album is divided into five tracks, but like their other albums, Absolutego and Flood, it plays out like one extended piece and is meant to be listened to straight through in one sitting. It starts out with a slow, ugly doom riff that repeats for several minutes before heading into a stretched-out, psychedelic jam section on the lengthy second track, "Ganbou-Ki." After another succession of heavy riffing, psych-rock jamming, and a little bit of up-tempo punk action (the first part of "Kuruimizu," which still retains a Melvins-like feel), they move into several minutes of spacey, surprisingly pretty guitar/bass picking, similar to much of what's on Flood. Finally, they settle into a dense guitar/bass feedback drone à la Earth for the lengthy final track, "Vomitself." The album as a whole feels like a sort of journey in terms of how it opens in one vein, moves through various other sections, and then closes in yet another style, but it also maintains a consistent mood (and they don't use the word "doom" to refer to this type of music for nothing). In any case, Amplifier Worship proves Boris to be on the more innovative (not to mention heavy) end of the sludge/doom metal spectrum and is recommended to open-eared fans of the style; casual listeners, on the other hand, will probably have trouble getting into the album, since it does require some patience. via allmusic.com

Boris - Huge

Over the past few years, Sunn O))) have become synonymous with the concept of "art-metal." At best, the idea suggests that heavy, guitar-based bands are thinking creatively about how to sound more brutal than their forbearers-- recording vocals inside a coffin, for example; or warping the five-minute Black Sabbath dirge into a 15-minute-long, beatless storm of frequencies admittedly engineered to induce defecation. At worst, the idea nourishes a well-established sense of superiority over metal's fans: One New York Times headline addressing the so-called trend read "Heavy Metal Gets an M.F.A."-- a title whose cleverness kicks in only if you believe that people who like heavy metal are not only stupid and unimaginative, but poor, too.
The idea's crowning irony, though, is that most art-metal practitioners seem more indebted-- and endeared-- to their vulgar cousins than, say, art-pop groups or underground rappers. No volume of style-section garbage can cover up the fact that Sunn O)))-- a band co-founded by former Burning Witch guitarist Stephen O'Malley-- stakes their reputation on monoliths of noise called "Helloween" and "Bass Aliens". And when asked if 2004 was a good year for metal by the website Lords of Metal, Asva principal (and former Burning Witch and sometime Sunn O))) bassist) Stuart Dahlquist said, without irony, "No, Dime[bag Darrell, of Pantera] got killed"-- the party line.
In an interview from 2001, Stephen O'Malley described Burning Witch's two EPs-- recorded between 1996 and 1998 and collected on Crippled Lucifer-- as "slow, heavy music playing around with time." On 1996's Steve Albini-recorded Towers, the band finishes only five songs over 47 minutes, demonstrating not only stubbornness, but alien restraint. Every note is choked; every crevice between is pulled taut and splattered with feedback. Songs bottom out minutes before stopping. Vocalist Edgy 59's lyrics plunge into familiar forms of loneliness and self-destruction, but he sings them with the sustained hysteria of someone boiling. He could make a dessert menu sound unpleasant. Like great horror movies, Towers doesn't just play with time, it punishes it for moving too fast. Shock-- quick, cheap, and explosive-- is subjugated to duration, which is meant to be agonizing. When I talk to friends about what compels me to horror movies, I bring up the scene in Dario Argento's Suspiria where a girl falls into a pit full of barbed wire: Seeing her fall gives me a jolt, but it's watching her try and crawl through it that takes my breath away.
And while time-- specifically, their commitment to distorting it-- is of the band's essence, its real innovations are in syntax: the way riffs fit together and songs are structured. While 1998's Rift.Canyon.Dreams contains more boilerplate, blues-influenced heavy metal riffs than Towers, they cycle at odd intervals, collect extra notes from nowhere, stretch, and spiral. By drifting back toward an established vocabulary, the band is able to play off listeners' expectations: If Towers is a foreign language, Rift.Canyon.Dreams, like Deerhoof or Captain Beefheart's music, is a familiar one tortured and scrambled to reveal new definitions-- a dictionary for much of what followed them.
After Burning Witch disbanded, Stephen O'Malley formed Sunn O))) with Greg Anderson, and bassist Stuart Dahlquist formed Asva with help from Burning Witch drummer B.R.A.D. Like Sunn O)))-- but unlike Burning Witch-- Asva is a band whose music prizes tone and atmosphere over composition. That's not to say that Dahlquist isn't traditionally musical-- he is, staunchly. But compared to O'Malley's near-clinical austerity with Sunn O)))-- at times, an exerise in charting every gradation between extremely heavy and unbearably heavy-- Dahlquist's approach sounds homely, almost arcane. What You Don't Know Is Frontier, his second full-length, is a testament not to metal's extremity, but to its epic grandiosity-- a trait that sometimes aligns it more closely with 19th-century opera and Ennio Morricone soundtracks than hard rock. The imagery conjured by the album is lonely and pre-civilized: cliffs, lightning, animal-on-animal fighting-- the Awesome, as defined in books featuring God.
WYDKIF is humane, almost personal. Dahlquist even allows the occasional groove to foment. But only for a second, and with absolutely no smiling. Grooving-- and all related looseness-- has no place on long journeys into the void. But even if light-heartedness isn't what draws listeners to epic metal, seriousness has limits, and sometimes, Dahlquist finds them. At least the music stays gorgeous, the compositions well-structured, and the musicianship-- from members of Secret Chiefs 3, Mr. Bungle, and Earth-- excellent. Dahlquist's ear seems to have gotten broader since 2005's Futurists Against the Ocean, too: instead of leaning on rock-combo brutalism, he stakes his compositions on delicate percussion, wordless vocals, and quilts of sine waves. It's like he just realized there's more than one shade of gray.
Asva makes extreme music, but I wouldn't call it avant-garde by any stretch-- its passion is too familiar, its forms too recognizable. (It's worth adding that the title comes from a poem written by Dahlquist's brother, former Silkworm drummer Michael, who was killed in 2005-- a continuing trauma that has been a professed influence on Dahlquist's music.) They say the true aesthete can marvel at the beauty of the waves even as they drown-- a sentiment Dahlquist, unquestionably a feeler, would probably echo. For all the chatter about "heady metal," it's nice to hear a musician managing to stand apart from his genre without much thought at all. Via pitchfork.com 

Burning Witch - History Of Hell

Raw as a heroin abscess, Buzzov-en's debut, To a Frown, ushered in a devastatingly ugly admixture of bastardized Southern rock riffs, heavy metal, noise rock, and the broken bottle aggression of early Black Flag. Though not the band's finest album, it packs a violent wallop, with Kirk's contorted, half-growled, half-screamed vocals threatening menacingly over the sturm and drang of the rhythm section. Though Buzzov-en owes part of its aesthetic -- both in appearance and sound -- to Southern scum rock outfit Antiseen, they upped the ante in energy, presence, recklessness, and songwriting. Half of the album resides in sludgy blues riffs dragged through the sewer of Kirk's drug- and violence-oriented lyrics, and the other half is pure Damaged-influenced, early-American hardcore aggression. The band toured relentlessly for this album, destroying clubs and leaving a wake of drug-induced terror in its wake. A year later, Buzzov-en was signed to Roadrunner, where it would release its finest album, Sore. via allmusic.com

Buzzoven - Shove

A killer riff crushes it’s way out of the speakers. It repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats.
The endless cascade of repeating riffs create an highly psychedelic feel, where you can reach a higher consciousness without intoxicating your body. The feeling grows along with the track. The growth itself is slow but intentional. The tracks are created and executed with a fierce accuracy and perspective.
Every hit and note have their meaning. None the less the sound is crushing like a panzer battalion on a slow march. There is a dangerous groove hanging over the record that manages to marry the world of stoner rock with the creative drone doom of Sunn 0))).
The added trippy passages adds on the flower people feel and fullfills the sound with a hippie aesthetic that the band name let’s you expect. Effects fill the soundscape adding more to the sound than just heavy distortion. The elements are mastered to the full with all parts perfecting each other. I cannot emphasize enough on how well everything is executed, only the vocals could be questioned concerning theirpurpose and function. As for themselves the vocals do not create any irritation, but it feels like they don’t add anything worthwhile to the mix.
Still over looking a minor flaw, Dark Buddha Rising is a definite force to be reckoned with! via www.damned-by-light.com

Dark buddha rising - Transcent

Cough is one of those bands that you can’t not run into once you get into doom.  They will be in your face as you take your first steps into the vast, miserable ocean of the genre, and their name is very present and out there.  There are two types of bands that demand this kind of attention simply by existing: those that are hyped too much and are made out to be this big thing, and those that are this big because they have merit.

Cough falls into the second category.  The merit in their blend of the art of making misery is what sets them so high, and, for the record, Cough is one of the finest bands out there, period.  Without sliding any further down the slippery slope of fan-bias, let us continue.

At the core of Cough’s music is filth and misery.  The centerpiece of every song is the down-tuned guitars agonizingly churning out low-tempo riffs of dooooooooom - chord-slams, feedback, sludge-like lurches forward and snail-pace grooves.  The bass supports the guitar admirably.  The drumming, especially given the very low speeds at which most songs go about their business, is astonishing, as it finds a way to play with the otherwise very steady rhythms.  Another good thing is the vocals.  Admittedly, the vocals have two main modes, throaty, sort of mid-pitched screaming and the clean ‘singing.’ The clean vocals have a very good range, from doomy, stretched-out shouting to gentle croons, but the mid-pitched bellows of daemons is what sells the vocals.

“Sigillum Luciferi” is one of those albums that is impossible to break down song-by-song.  Oh, I can do it, alright, it just wouldn’t be any good. Instead, I will focus on this album as a whole, which is where my first point lies.  “Sigillum Luciferi” isn’t a collection of songs, it is an album.  It is a coherent whole and at no point do you believe you are listening to anything other than a Cough record.

The atmosphere is miserable, and I do mean the black-hue-and-haze, overbearing, no-hope-in-life, worn-out-in-a-back-alley miserable.  It’s sinister, slow darkness feels like slowly being choked and worse still, liking it.  It’s like loving a noose in its filth, and it’s delicious.  Of course, this is aided by how the riffs themselves are structured, as each one seems to have been tailor-fitted to induce as much misery as possible.  Therein, Cough’s strength appears: “Sigillum Luciferi” is a very refined, very well-thought out effort.  Each song is structured in the way each riff is structured – careful, though natural and heavy without fail.  Each section is refined into a hypnotic, nigh-ritualistic dirge made of repetition and back-and-forth between the few riffs.  This same structure applies to where the songs are placed: after the head-crushing pure beauty of “Hole in the Infinite,” for instance, we are offered solace in the lumbering, sludge-like riff and even pacing of “288 Years of Sin” which, in itself, leads to the utterly lethargic “Northern Plague.”

“Northern Plague” is followed up by a perfect example of how in “Sigillum Luciferi” each part transitions smoothly into each other, so much so that the entire song feels like the natural output of a guitar/bass/drum-strapped beast let loose in his natural habitat.  See, the fifth track, “Shallow Grave” is a case-in-point.  It begins as a doomy Cough dirge: nice monolith riff, slow pacing, but, after a few minutes, the band teases with a bit of playful groove in the riff, before returning to the starter. Then, out of nowhere, the pace suddenly hits an upper-mid-tempo and the band launches into catchy, foot-stomping grooves, and embellish this section further with a burning solo before returning to the initial riff, and then slowly degenerating that into feedback and noise by gradually slowing it down.  It’s genius!

However, for those that may think this is a riff-tastic doom-fest: sorry, but the riffs on this beast are few.  But never mind that, because here, less is undoubtedly more.  See, it’s one thing to make ten, twelve-minute songs with the same two riffs, quite another to make both count in such a way that you are left satisfied.  Returning to the earlier point about structure, the songs themselves have a peculiar quality, in that you can safely drift away from a song, let your mind waver, and it will find a way to snap you back to attention, and you won’t wonder what song you’re on.  That’s a rare and incredible feat, in my book.

A further point emerges right here.  Cough use a lot of feedback.  Hell, the opener, “Killing Fields” is about three and a half minutes of feedback cut by single chords and single drum hits.  In the other songs, like “Shallow Grave”s closing salvoes or some of “Lyssavirus,” the band use feedback to gradually eat away at the remnants of a riff until nothing is left. Their ability to refine that noise into actual riffs and doing it so naturally and so without abrasive transitions is a very good trait of this album.  Further, a convention that was present in “Ritual Abuse” also makes an appearance (in “Lyssavirus” specifically) which is to say that before beginning the initial riff, the guitar plays a stripped-down, almost test-tab version of it for a bit.  It’s a nice trick that creates a jammy impression and fits the album.

SO, OVERALL, WHY SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO THIS? Easy.  It’s one of the best doom records out there, along with “Ritual Abuse.” That’s simply it, no two ways about it.  This record is cut from a different cloth, and cut out to be well fucking worth the almost-hour (57 minutes, to be precise) that it will take from your life in the first listen, and many more almost-hours it will take by virtue of its sheer addictive properties. It doesn’t stray far from where it is comfortable, yeah, but you wouldn’t want it to, anyway. I don’t know how else I can say “perfect,” really, so stop reading this, and go listen to this album.  Go.  Now. (via doommantia.com) 


Cough - Shallow Grave

I have been a Dark Castle fan for a minute, so when I heard they had a new record coming out I was stoked, but at the same time I had very high expectations. With the release of their new album Surrender To All Life Beyond Form, out now via Profound Lore, they fucking blew my mind. Dark Castle has stretched what we call doom & sludge to encompass many more layers that are not usually associated with these genres. I knew something was different by the way the first track, “Surrender To All Life Beyond Form,” started. It begins with this killer dirge bit, then this almost 1st Nations chant comes in, and then on a wave of strange feedback, super distorted blackened vocals kick in – from that point, they had me. Surrender To All Life Beyond Form is a real dark tapestry of sonics, so you will hear something new every time. At certain points when I listen to this album I get the sense as though the songs are alive & breathing, & are trying to tell me something. Dark Castle is heavy as ever on this album, but they are using space as an effect unto itself – they allow the effects they create to transform many times before they introduce another effect. The song “Learning To Unlearn” is haunting experimental doom that explores the textures of bleeps, piano & cavernous vocals that manifest their apocalyptic visions. The emotional impact that the song “To Hide Is To Die” has is fucking transcendental, & Stevie’s singing voice on this track is sublime. With this album, Dark Castle have done what I like to hear bands do – take chances & develop their imagination outside of their comfort zone. The next time I see this band in person I’m going to walk up to them, give them a huge hug & say job well freaking done! It gets better: they are hitting the road this summer with YOB. So after the jump, get all of the tour details & some other surprises. (via cvltnation.com) 


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