Album Review: Smoke & Doomsday Profit, Split LP
Everybody wins. As Smoke from Richmond, Virginia, and Doomsday Profit from Durham, North Carolina, join forces for a six-song split LP under the banner of Olde Magick Records, neither misses the opportunity to showcase a distinctive voice within the sphere of Southern heavy and sludge metal. Taken as a whole, the split runs 35 minutes, and so is fairly concise, but that is plenty of time enough for both four-pieces to establish an atmosphere and give listeners a look at where they’re at in terms of sound and what they’re bringing to the style. In the case of Smoke, the bluesier swamp-psych of eight-minute opening track (also the longest; immediate points) “Appalachian Black Magic” — one’s brain wants to add a ‘k’ there too, but no, it’s just the regular ol’ magic-y kind of magic — creates an immediate sense of space in the mix, building up fluidly as a rolling haze might, setting the tone for the arrival of the vocals, which are effects-treated but not nearly as blown-out as they get.
Guitarist/vocalist Dalton Huskin (also Sun Years), who did the cover art for both sides, has a steady presence in the song, and without tipping into hey-whoa-mama-yeah cliché or chestbeating hyper-dudery, he, lead guitarist Ben Gold, bassist Stephen Tyree and drummer Alex Thurston branch off from the the sometimes noisy take the band has presented to date on their 2022 debut full-length, Groupthink (review here), which, no worries, is well represented here as “Scavenger” and “Hellish Rebuke” follow the expansive and lumbering slowdown finish of “Appalachian Black Magic” with a harder-hitting and rawer-feeling scathe. “Scavenger” in particular brings to mind a swinging interpretation of Unsane‘s ’90s-era assault, but tonally, in the impact of Thurston‘s kick and the punch of Tyree‘s bass that seems to be brought even further forward in “Hellish Rebuke,” the mini-set builds on the dynamic that the album laid out and, nasty or vibing, sounds like the work of a band actively engaged in their own growth. Recorded at Fainting Goat Studios and by Scotty Sandwich at The Sandwich Shoppe, mixed by Ben McLeod (All Them Witches) and mastered like both sides of the release by the esteemed Mikey Allred at Dark Art Audio, theirs is one of two strong showings here.
The other, of course, is from Doomsday Profit, who answer Smoke‘s next-gen stylizations with their own complementary take in “No Salvation,” “I Am Your God” and “Void Ritual.” While not a stated trilogy so far as I know, the three seem to set up a linear narrative across the split’s shorter half, running on either side of five minutes apiece and seeming to hold in reserve a particular vitriol for the closer. Fair enough for the bludgeoning. Last heard from with 2021’s In Idle Orbit (review here), Doomsday Profit drop the plague-horseman noms de guerre they used at the time in favor of presenting the lineup as guitarist/vocalist Bryan Reed, lead guitarist/vocalist Kevin See, bassist/vocalist Ryan Sweeney and drummer Tradd Yancey, who also recorded (and mixed) at The Sandwich Shoppe, and the straightforwardness of that shift in mindset does nothing to lessen either the pestilential extremity they wield in their sound or the outright lumber of their growl-topped riffing, as the early nod in “No Salvation” makes clear from the start.
In Doomsday Profit too, though, one can hear the affect of fresh ideas being brought to long-tenured genre parameters. Doomsday Profit are neither entirely doom, nor sludge metal, and though “I Am Your God” wants nothing for an overarching sense of bite as it unfurls grueling, chug-offset nod, the shift the band undertakes to a more meditative sound from the initial pummeling wrought is not to be discounted either in the smoothness of its transition or the hurdling of imaginary barriers it makes. Amid about 15 minutes of music — outside of it being a single extended piece, which isn’t what’s happening; these are individual songs that tie well together — it can be difficult to harness a sense of linearity, but by the time Doomsday Profit arrive at “Void Ritual,” the gnashing going on under the more open-feeling riffing creates an atmosphere that feels earned by the breadth of the two cuts prior; the languid malevolence and weighted chug in the last moments of “I Am Your God” before the concluding cymbal wash feel like a step along the path to where the finale goes. Just because it’s brutal doesn’t mean it can’t be spacious, and vice versa.
Again, the entirety of the split is still on the shorter end of full-length, and nothing contained within is so overblown as to feel needlessly grandiose — Doomsday Profit‘s lurch requires a certain stateliness of posture, and if you’re going to declare to someone, “I am your god,” over and over, you probably want to sound serious — and while they’re in pursuit of different aesthetic goals, Smoke and Doomsday Profit both show themselves to be groups continuing to discover who they are and just how far their reach can go in songwriting. I’ll spare you genre-type hyperbole about remaking Southern metal in their image, both because who cares and because it feels premature, but each of these two acts brings a distinct creative voice (and no, I’m not just talking about vocals) to the proceedings in commanding style, and each seems to have a better idea of who they are and want to be as a group than they had a couple years ago. They are growing bands. They have grown and will hopefully continue to do so.
At the same time, there’s more substance to this release than the potential of those who’ve made it, by which I mean that whatever Doomsday Profit and Smoke may or may not do over the next few years of their respective tenures, their contributions here are significant and not to be ignored in the face of resounding statements to come. They are not necessarily alone in expanding the scope of what a term like ‘Southern heavy’ can encompass, but this shared release highlights those efforts in ways that are undeniably righteous, in addition to being forward-thinking.
Smoke & Doomsday Profit, Split LP (2024)
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Tags: Doomsday Profit, Durham, Lynchburg, North Carolina, Olde Magick Records, Smoke, Smoke Doomsday Profit Split, Virginia
