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Salome: Diagnosis Terminal

With their sophomore full-length, Terminal, Annandale, Virginia-based sludgers Salome make what might just become their definitive statement of intent. The bass-less guitar/drum/vocal trio blast out seven torturous tracks of blisteringly demented doom, seeming to revel in the misery they propagate. The guitars mask the otherwise missing bottom end, and though what the band bring to sludge innovates more in terms of overall aesthetic than sound, their ultra-hateful atmosphere and penchant for the dynamic is even more what contributes to the success of Terminal.

My go-to comparison point for this kind of über-doom is generally Khanate, and while Salome are less minimalist in everything but the lyrics and vicious screams of Katherine Katz, there are some similarities. Perhaps a more appropriate analogy could be made to New Orleans madmen Thou, who affect a similarly unstable ambience in their music yet maintain a lofty air of artistry. With Terminal, Salome presents thoughtful if openly-structured songwriting in a style bent on extremity, and their balance of noise and monstrous riffing shows itself right from the beginning of “The Message.” The track (and thus, the album) begins with Echoplex noise that gets cut off by the guitar of Rob Moore and the drums of Aaron Deal, who begin the song with Katz following shortly behind on vocals. It’s a technique they use several times throughout Terminal, perhaps most noticeably as the 17-minute noise-only fuck-you  “An Accident of History” leads into the decidedly more active “The Witness.” It’s a way for Salome to make their songs more memorable, and despite being telegraphed by the time you’re mostly through the album, it works.

If you’re the kind of person to skip a song, however, it’s all the more likely you’ll just pass by “An Accident of History” altogether, since it’s genuinely hard to sit through. Moore offers some changes in his guitar noise, amp hum, droning, etc., but it’s all abrasive and it’s a challenge I’ve only managed to meet a couple times in listening to Terminal. The shorter bursts of noise, like that which ends “The Message” and bleeds into Deal’s starting the title track, seem more purposeful, but it’s obvious Salome didn’t have accessibility in mind when putting together the album. That said, the rhythmic pulse driving “Master Failure” and Katz’s near-perfect cadence of “We tried, we failed” accompanying make for one of Terminal’s strongest and hardest-hitting moments. At 6:45, it’s second only to the title cut as the shortest song on the record, but it’s also the tightest structurally, so the change is noticeable in more than one way. I wouldn’t look for it to be a hit single anytime soon, but it’s bound to stick with lovers of the gruesomely extreme in sludge.

The 10-plus-minute “Epidemic” repurposes a drum-thud/riff call and response similar to Slayer’s “Raining Blood” and contrasts it with kick-drum lumber and death growls from Katz to make a doomer’s delight. A noisy break begins around 2:15 and lasts until just after the five-minute mark when Moore creeps back in on guitar, eventually relaunching the song with Deal in a fittingly gradual build, returning even to the Slayerism toward the close, as if to remind you where the song came from after so long a trip through it. As much fun as that sonic reference is, Moore and Deal do more to show off their tightness in the midsection of “The Witness,” slowing to single hits and managing to stay in time with each other (this is incredibly challenging and something that more often than not gets fixed in ProTools later) while still keeping some semblance of groove going before transitioning back into the song and Katz’s return on vocals.

“The Witness” once again ends with noise and transitions into the surprising hits of closer “The Unbelievers,” which basically thumps and rings out for the first two of its total nine minutes. “The Unbelievers” provides a suitably brutal end to Terminal, capturing the changes and the abrasion that Salome built their tracks on while not losing sight of the sludge-laden groove in summary fashion. Of course, it has to be noise building to a sudden cut off that caps the song, and it is, making the silence following all the louder. I give kudos to Salome for their willingness to explore noise and juxtaposing it with an extreme take on the more traditional elements of sludge doom, and find that on the whole, Katz, Moore and Deal mostly earn the hype they’ve gotten with Terminal, if not some of the hyperbole. What I mean to say is Terminal isn’t the one-album sludge revolution some are making it out to be, but it is easily among the top echelon of aural meanness and tough competition for the last several years’ worth of genre output. That’s not to underplay it at all. If Salome can continue to develop their atmospheric approach and keep hold of the malevolence so present on Terminal, they’re going to be a landmark band. Their second album already leaves one hell of a footprint.

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