Foehammer, Second Sight: Deep Reaches
Posted in Reviews on July 12th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
Fires glowing in the distance as a lone ship sails troubled waters by moonlight, a single figure visible in the glow — you might say the Luciana Nedelea cover art of Foehammer‘s Australopithecus Records-delivered debut full-length, Second Sight, is appropriate for the album itself. The Virginian outfit might’ve also gone with someone peeling their face off or a fire burning away an ancient forest, but if the idea is conveying a sense of warning or foreboding, they got there anyhow. And fair enough. Foehammer‘s 2015 self-titled EP (review here) was unbridled in its rumbling devastation, and Second Sight — which is actually their third release, if you count a prior 2014 demo — either builds on the accomplishments of its predecessor or slow-motion-wrecking-ball smashes them to pieces, depending on how you want to look at it.
Their violence is wrought in the traditional death-doom heightened language: in opener “Black Númenórean,” the sailor with the tattered sails is “in Carn Dûm [let’s assume that’s pronounced “Doom” — ed.] amongst his kinsmen and his thralls” as he tells of a coming war, and the three-piece of bassist/vocalist Jay Cardinell (ex-Durga Temple/Gradius), guitarist Joe Cox (ex-Gradius) and drummer Ben “Vang” Blanton (ex-VOG) — who seems since to be out of the band since the album was made and replaced by Ben Price (also At the Graves) — don’t limit the dark prophecy just to the opener. Likewise, 16-minute closer “The Seer” gives itself to bleak visions of things to come. And the accompanying guitar, bass and drums could hardly be more evocative of that sentiment either. Anyone who heard the self-titled and lived to tell the tale can indeed speak to the level of tonal onslaught Foehammer hurled forth like they were loading bricks to hand-build an endtime temple, and Second Sight keeps the lurk ‘n’ lurch vision of überdoom central to the proceedings. In four songs and 46 minutes, they cast a pall over the spirit that extends even beyond the maddeningly thick tones and slow rumbling to a tension that seems to cry out for release all the while and is flatly denied.
Basically, they just let the pressure build in your bones until you want to send them an email begging mercy. “Dear sirs; Please. I only have one skull and I need it to keep my brain from falling out of my ear,” and so on. I’m sure they’d get back and be really polite about it, but that certainly doesn’t stop Second Sight‘s visceral bludgeoning, and if all of this sounds like hyperbole, so do the tracks themselves. Hyperbolic doom. Extreme extremity. They offer no letup when it comes to the excruciating pace of “Black Númenórean” (10:15) or “Recurring Grave” (7:54), “Axis Mundi” (11:17) and “The Seer” (16:41) which follow, and though it doesn’t necessarily seem to be a concept record in the sense of telling a single story — that is, there’s no wizard journeying across a barren tundra in search of craft beer or whatever it is people write concept albums about these days — there’s no question the songs tie together in flow and are united in their focus on brutality. Moments like the quiet intro to “Axis Mundi” after the blunt force of “Recurring Grave” bolster the darkened atmosphere overall, and as Foehammer roll out the overwhelming back-to-back lumber of the album’s two longest tracks in “Axis Mundi” and “The Seer,” one can almost feel the sound waves vibrating in their stomach, regardless of the actual volume.
Cox takes an echoing solo at the end of the former, but even that feels viscous in its tone, and by the time Foehammer get that far, the die is well cast as regards overarching ambience. As much as Cardinell and Cox both deserve praise for bringing such consuming low-end to bear, likewise the job of engineer/mixer Kevin Bernsten at Developing Nations in Baltimore, and the mastering of James Plotkin deserve to be highlighted, because for as much of Second Sight feels willfully given over to noise, feedback, and sustained low-tone wash, there’s no actual lack of clarity either in sound or in purpose. Foehammer capture every bit of their specific kind of aural cruelty in its full bloom, and while even in its post-midpoint stretch of minimalism, one wouldn’t necessarily call “The Seer” clean, its sound 100 percent matches the band’s intention toward the outermost reaches of the imagination’s nightmarish manifestations.
That means conjuring a breadth that might seem contradictory to some of the more claustrophobic effects of such tonal thickness or the unremitting gurgles from Cardinell on vocals that render the lyrics largely decipherable without a cheat sheet, but it’s not. If Foehammer are world-building, they’re just creating a space to tear down. But that doesn’t mean the space never existed. To wit, from the ultra-slow unfolding of “Black Númenórean” onward through the throat-singing chants in “The Seer,” Second Sight seems to carry the listener ever downward. Its movement varies some in tempo, but the ambience is central to the mission, and that is never compromised regardless of the cosmic moments of flourish that at times remind of YOB at their heaviest. In hearing it, I have to remind myself it’s the band’s first long-player. They’ve been around five years, and even the EP seemed to arrive with a sense that Foehammer knew what they were doing, but Second Sight is on another level entirely. It’s not just that Cox, Cardinell and Blanton manage to stay within such grueling tempos or that they bring such a sense of max-volume execution to what’s still a headphone-worthy offering, but that every step they take, even unto the last noisy fade of the closer, holds meaning.
As they seem to dig deeper and deeper into “Axis Mundi” after “Recurring Grave” — which if I’m not mistaken is actually the speediest inclusion at a pace of “really quite slow” — Foehammer are in complete control of the churn they wield. I know that no matter how big or menacing it sounds it’s still just guitar, bass and drums, but for something where the aesthetic is so much a part of the statement being made, there’s an underlying current of songwriting that provides the assurance Second Sight won’t simply deconstruct itself along with whatever else should happen to be in its plodding path. No doubt in my mind it’s one of the best debut albums of 2018, but even such a designation would seem to minimize the achievements in these tracks. Among the best albums of the year, period, and still hopefully only the beginning of the horrors Foehammer will ultimately realize.
Australopithecus Records on Bandcamp
