Quarterly Review: Hour of 13, Skepticism, Count Raven, Owl Cave, Zeup, Dark Bird, Hope Hole, Smote, Gristmill, Ivory Primarch
Posted in Reviews on October 4th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Hope you had a good weekend. Hope your bank account survived Bandcamp Friday. I gotta admit, I hit it a little hard, made four $10-plus purchases. A certain rainforest-named mega-corporate everything-distro site has me out of the habit of thinking of paying for shipping, but that comes back to bite you. And if there’s a tape or a CD and the download costs $7 and the tape costs $10 and comes with the download too, what would you have me do? Throw another five or six bucks in there for shipping and that adds up. Still, for a good cause, which is of course supporting bands nd labels who make and promote killer stuff. I don’t mind that.
We’ve arrived at the next to last day of the Fall 2021 Quarterly Review. It’s a cool one, I hope you’ll agree. If not, maybe tomorrow.
Quarterly Review #51-60:
Hour of 13, Black Magick Rites
The history of Hour of 13, 14 years on from their self-titled debut (discussed here) is complex and full of comings and goings. With Black Magick Rites — which was posted for a day in Nov. 2020 and then removed from the public sphere until this Shadow Kingdom release — founding multi-instrumentalist Chad Davis takes over vocal duties as well, charting the way forward for the band as a complete solo-project with seven songs and 43 minutes of lower-fi classic-style doom that bears in its title track some semblance of garage mentality but avoids most of the modern trappings such a designation implies. Satan features heavily, as one would expect. “House of Death” leans on its chorus hard, but opener “His Majesty of the Wood” and the eight-minute “Within the Pentagram,” as well as the payoff of closer “The Mystical Hall of Dreams” seem to show where the long-tumultuous outfit could be headed melodically and in grimly grandiose style if Davis — also of The Crooked Whispers, The Sabbathian, countless others in a variety of styles — wills it. Here’s hoping.
Shadow Kingdom Records website
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Skepticism, Companion
Graceful death. 30 years later, one might expect no less from Finnish funeral doom progenitors than that, and it’s exactly what they bring to the six-song/48-minute Companion. “Calla” sets the tempo for what follows at a dirge march with keyboard adding melodies to the procession as “The Intertwined” continues the slow roll, with drums and piano taking over in the midsection before the full brunt is borne again. “The March of the Four” follows with church organ running alongside the drawn-out guitar movement, each hit of the kick drum somehow forlorn beneath the overlaid growls. At least superficially, this is the Skepticism one imagines: slow, mournful, beauty-in-darkness, making dirty sounds but emerging without a stain on their formalwear. Closer “The Swan and the Raven” is a triumph in this, a revelry-that-isn’t, and “Passage” and even gives the tempo a relative kick, but that and the consuming drama of “The Inevitable” feel within the band’s aesthetic wheelhouse. Or their mortuary, anyhow. Honestly, they know what they’re doing, they’ve done it for a long time, and they don’t release records that often, so there’s an element of novelty just to the fact that the album exists, but if you put on Companion and listen to it, they also sound like they’re taking an entire genre to school. A genre they helped define, no less.
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Count Raven, The Sixth Storm
Long-running Swedish doom traditionalists Count Raven are in immediate conversation with their own classic era with the album title The Sixth Storm serving as a reference to their 1990 debut, Storm Warning. Indeed, it is their sixth full-length, and it makes up for the decade-plus it’s been since they were last heard from with a 73-minute, all-in nine-track assemblage of oldschool Sabbathian doom metal, tinged with classic heavy rock and a broader vision that picks up where 2009’s Mammons War left off in epics like “The Nephilims” and “Oden,” the latter the album’s apex ahead of the Ozzy-ish piano/keyboard ballad “Goodbye” following on from the earlier “Heaven’s Door.” Some contemplation of mortality perhaps from founding guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist Dan “Fodde” Fondelius to go with the more socially themed “The Giver and the Taker,” “Baltic Storm,” opener “Blood Pope” or even “Oden,” which bases itself around Christianity’s destruction of pagan culture. Fair enough. Classic doom spearheaded by a guy who’s been at it for more than three decades. No revolution in style, but if you’d begrudge Count Raven their first album in 12 years, why?
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Owl Cave, Broken Speech
Something for everyone in Owl Cave‘s Broken Speech, at least so long as your vision of “everyone” just includes fans of various extreme metallic styles. The Parisian one-man outfit’s debut release arrives as a single 43-minute track, led off by the sample “your silence speaks volumes.” What unfolds from there is a linear progression of movements through which S. — the lone party responsible for the guitar, bass, drum programming and other sampling, as there are obscure bits that might be manipulated voices and so on — weaves progressive black metal, doom, industrial churn, noise rock and other genre elements together with a willful sense of experimentalism and uniting heft. Some stretches are abrasive, some are nearly empty, some guitar-led, some more percussive, but even at its most raging, “Broken Speech” holds to its overarching atmosphere, grim as it is, and that allows it to ponder with scorn and melancholy alike before finishing out with a cacophony of blasts and wash leading to a last residual drone.
Time Tombs Production webstore
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Zeup, Blind
Sharply executed, uptempo heavy/desert-style rock in the Californian tradition as filtered through a European legacy of bands that spans no less an amount of time, Zeup‘s second EP, Blind, is an in-and-out kind of affair. Four songs, 17 minutes. They’re not looking to take up too much of your day. But the energy they bring to that time, whether it’s the swinging bassline in “Belief” or the initial jolt of “Illusions,” the rolling catchiness of “Who You Are” or the closing title-track’s more Sabbath-spirited stomp, is organic, full, and sincere. In terms of style, the Copenhagen three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Jakob Bach, bassist/backing vocalist Morten Rold and drummer Morten Barth aren’t trying to get away with convincing anybody they invented heavy rock and roll, but the stamp they put on their own songs is welcome right up to the capper solo on “Blind” itself. Familiar, but crisp and refreshing like cold beer on a hot day, if that’s your thing.
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Dark Bird, Out of Line
A drift calls you forward as Dark Bird‘s fourth album (amid many short releases and experimentalist whathaveyous), Out of Line, begins with “And it All Ends Well” and its title-track, the Toronto-based Roan Bateman pushing outward melodically before adding more fuzz to the shroom-folk of “Stranger,” an underlying sense of march telling of the made-in-dark-times spirit that so much of the record seems to actively work against. “Down With Love” is a dream given shimmer in its strum and no less ethereal when the maybe-programmed drums start, and “Undone” is the bummed-out-with-self ’90s-lysergic harmony that you never heard at the time but should have. So it goes en route to the buzzing finale “This is It,” with “Minefied” echoing “Out of Line” with a vibe like Masters of Reality at their most ethereal, “With You” making a late highlight of its underlying organ drone and the vocals that top it in the second half, and “The Ghost” somehow turning Western blues despite, no, not at all doing that thing. 43 minutes of a world I’d rather live in.
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Hope Hole, Death Can Change
I’m not saying they don’t still have growing to do or work ahead of them in carving out their own approach from the elements their self-released debut album, Death Can Change, puts to work across its nine songs, but I am definitely saying that the Toledo, Ohio, duo of M.A. Snyder and Mike Mullholand, who’ve dubbed their project Hope Hole, are starting out in an admirable place. Throughout a vinyl-ready 37 minutes that makes a centerpiece of the roughed up The Cure cover “Kyoto Song,” the two-piece bridge sludged nod, classic heavy rock, progressive doom ambience, stonerly awareness — see “Cisneros’ Lament” — and a healthy dose of organ to result in a genre-blender sound that both chases individuality and manifests it in rudimentary form, perhaps arriving at some more melodic cohesion in the of-its-era closer “Burning Lungs” after rougher-edged processions, but even there not necessarily accounting for the full scope of the rest of the songs enough to be a full summary. The songs are there, though, and as Hope Hole continue to chase these demons, that will be the foundation of their progress.
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Smote, Drommon
Newcastle, UK, weirdo solo-outfit Smote released the two-part Drommon concurrent to March 2021’s Bodkin (review here), with tapes sold out from Base Materialism, and Rocket Recordings now steps in for a vinyl issue with two additional tracks splitting up the two-part title-cut, each piece of which runs just on either side of 16 minutes long. Drones and acid folk instrumentation, acoustics, sitars, electrified swirl — all of these come together in purposeful passion to create the textures of “Dommon (Part 1)” and “Drommon (Part 2),” and though it feels more directed with the complementary “Hauberk” and “Poleyn” included, the album’s experimental heart is well intact. Smote will make a stage debut next month, apparently as a four-piece around founder Daniel Foggin, so how that might play into the future of Smote as a full band in the studio remains to be seen. Drommon serves as argument heavily in favor of finding out.
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Gristmill, Heavy Everything
East Coast dudes playing West Coast noise, it may well be that Gristmill deserve points right off the bat on their debut long-player, Heavy Everything, both for the title and for avoiding the trap of sounding like Unsane that defines so, so, so much of Atlantic Seaboard noise rock. They’re too aggro in their delivery to be straight-up doom, but the slower crawl of guitar in “Remains Nameless” and “Glass Door” adds depth to the pounding delivered by the initial salvo of “Mitch,” “Mute” and “Irony,” but the punch of the bass throughout is unmistakable, and though I can’t help be reminded in listening about that time Seattle’s Akimbo went and wrote a record based in my beloved Garden State, the drawn-out roll of “Stone Rodeo” and final nod-into-chug in “Loon” show readiness to encompass something beyond the raw scathe in their work. Yeah, if they wanted to put out like six or seven albums that sound just like this over the next 15 or so years, I’d probably be on board for that for the meanness and more of this debut.
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Ivory Primarch, As All Life Burns
This is a satisfying meat grinder in which to plunge one’s face for about an hour. A Buschemi-chipper. A powdering-of-bone that begins with the lurching of longest track (immediate points) “The Masque” — beginning with an acid-test sample, no less — and moving through “Gleancrawler” and the faster-for-a-while-but-still-probably-slower-than-you’re-thinking title-track, having just consumed half an hour of your life and a little of your soul. Hyperbole? Of course. But these are extreme sounds and extreme times, so fuck it. Melbourne duo Ivory Primarch, throughout As All Life Burns, demonstrate precious little regard for whatever standard of decency one might apply, and the deathly, fetid “Keeper of Secrets” and the keyboard-laced “Aetherbeast” — seeming to answer back to the opener — are self-aware enough to be willful in that, not to mention the fact that they top off with the noise-drone of “Aftermath,” as if to survey the devastation they just wrought, mangled and duly bludgeoned. Nothing sounds cruel enough? Try this.
Cursed Monk Records on Bandcamp
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