Wilmington, North Carolina-based Gollum would be at home in the class of genre-fucking grinders coming out of Chicago if it weren’t for a distinctive Southern sludge bent to the music on their Rotten Records debut, The Core. With the record, the four-piece pay homage to fallen drummer Hunter Holland, who died late last year but appears on the album and has since been replaced in the band by Seth Long. The songs bounce ideas off Soilent Green and Melvins, but create an altogether darker, more purely metallic atmosphere that calls to mind a doom influence largely absent from the music.

The aforementioned sludge — EyeHateGod, Buzzov*en, etc. — manifests not only in the guitar tones or the screams of vocalist Shawn Corbett, but also the sporadic samples Corbett provides. The keyboard work he adds to opener “The Calm Before” or later cut “The Burden of Ubiquitous Scars” (held back from being an album highlight by some out of place female melodic vocals) adds a subtle and unique bent to the material without being overbearing. The keys are hardly ever the focus, even on the interlude “Amor Fati,” which appears in the middle of The Core. The closest they come is the horror movie intro of “Schadenfreude,” but that could just as easily be a sample.

Read more »