With three massively varied full-lengths already under their collective belt, be-robed Andalusian doom trio Orthodox return with the follow-up to 2009’s Sentencia in the form of Baal. Baal, released like its predecessor through Spanish imprint Alone Records, is comprised of five tracks that follow the band’s charted course of morose exploration, but find them bringing some crunch into their dirges. Where Sentencia had a medieval, blackly-plagued vibe to it, Baal is more directly doomed, though you might not know it from the near-six-minute instrumental opener, “Alto Padre,” which sets a tone of the kind of free jazz ethic Orthodox has been incorporating into their sound since their 2006 debut, Gran Poder. What remains most consistent about Orthodox on Baal is the band’s ability to affect a mood and their truly open creative sensibility. As much as they’re within the doom genre, they’re almost never limited by it, and from bassist Marco Serrato Gallardo’s victorious vocal warble on “Taurus” to the recklessly rhythmic drive of “Hanin Ba’al,” it seems Orthodox could go anywhere at any moment and be able to pull something coherent out of it.

That’s no easy feat when you’re working with this kind of sonic breadth. With just three members in the band – Gallardo is joined as ever by guitarist Ricardo Jimenez Gómez and drummer Borja Diaz Vera – Orthodox manage to completely set an atmosphere both expansive and encompassing, despite a traditionally doomed, spacious feel in the songs. Gómez’s layers of guitar on “Alto Padre” strum and ring freely while Vera rolls on his toms behind, leaving Gallardo to thicken and fill out the song on bass. It’s hard to tell from there where Orthodox might be going with Baal – at least hard to tell correctly – and it’s as though they’re leading from Sentencia directly into this newer material, leaving it up to the first track here to provide the transition from one to the next. If we take “Taurus,” then as the beginning of Baal proper, it’s a lumbering and thoroughly doom face that Orthodox are presenting on their latest work. Gallardo would seem to lead the charge with open bass notes ringing through the breaks and vocals that march as much as they do anything else, but Gómez soon injects one of Baal’s several killer solos and makes his presence known that way. Over time, the members of Orthodox have clearly gotten more comfortable with each other as players, and their interaction is the key to making Baal a success. They never sacrifice artistry or dumb down their playing style to highlight a riff, but neither do they fail to pay homage to the heaviness that was doubtless the impetus behind forming the band in the first place.

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It’s a well-known fact that when you begin a sentence with “When you think about it…” whatever you say afterwards is immediately lent credence. Someone out there is going to say, “You know, that’s right.” So:

When you think about it, doom and free jazz really aren’t all that different, are they?

That’s the question Sevilla trio Orthodox try to answer as they bridge the gap between the seemingly disparate sonics on their latest full-length, Sentencia (Alone Records). Comprised of a religiously-themed trinity of tracks — “Marcha de la Santa Sangre,” “Ascensión,” and “…Y la Muerte no Tendrá Dominio” — the record also runs a solid 33 minutes, so we see the theme of threes (threme?) works on multiple levels right from the start.

Of the three songs, “Marcha de la Santa Sangre” might be the most straightforward, as well as being the shortest at 2:41. Both it and “…Y la Muerte no Tendrá Dominio” are essentially frame pieces for the mammoth “Ascensión,” which towers above its companions at 26:28, but “Marcha de la Santa Sangre” has fuzz bass care of Marco Serrato Gallardo (who also handles vocals, but not yet) and Ricardo Jimenez Gómez’s guitar in addition to its trumpet and the funeral marching snare Borja Diaz Vera, and on that level isn’t so far off from the material on either of Orthodox’s last two albums, both of which had a marked jazz influence. What really separates Sentencia from 2006’s Gran Poder and 2007’s Amanecer en Puerta Oscura (both issued in the US via Southern Lord) is the atmosphere of “Ascensión,” which comes to represent that of the album as a whole.

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