Station Dysthymia are a funeral doom band from Siberia, and ‘Overhead, Without Any Fuss, The Stars Were Going Out’ is their second full-length. I thought at first in my literary ignorance that the album title was the product of some awkward Russian auto-translate software, but it’s actually a line from Arthur C Clarke’s short story ‘The Nine Billion Names Of God’, in which Tibetan monks seek to bring the universe to an end by listing all the names of the Creator in order. Whilst I haven’t read the story, the album certainly shares its themes of cosmology, eschatology and geographical isolation, with its eerie, sprawling tracks full of otherworldly menace and existential dread.
Opener ‘A Concrete Wall’ is a vast and disorienting piece weighing in at a mammoth 34 minutes. It starts with fragile clean chords hanging in the air, a repetitive and hypnotic riff then crashing down over and over to the accompaniment of low, booming, chant-like vocals. As the song sinks into echo-heavy murk, bleak melodies crawl across the landscape, the momentum and urgency slowly growing, before a leaden, gloom-laden hook takes over and drags the song forward. A respite follows in the form of floaty ambience, with humming frequencies intertwined with sounds of blowing wind and gentle, post-rocky clean guitars that bring to mind classic Isis at their most chilled-out. Then it’s back to that opening mesmeric riff, and on into an urgent, driving momentum, pushing forward to mountaintop cries and crashing drums, the song slowly straining under the weight of an intensifying din of tormented screams and swirling, echoing noise. Esoteric’s Greg Chandler was responsible for mastering the album, and it shows.
‘Ichor’, half as long but still lumbering and huge, is an interesting mixture, with more gentle post-rocky touches, mournful melodic leads, and a chunky, relatively lively sludge riff all worked around a backbone of crushing doom-drone. Towards the end some organ-like synth appears, giving a hint of Skepticism or perhaps Abstract Spirit. ‘Ichor’ reminds quite a lot of Abstract Spirit come to think of it, what with its haunting clean guitars seemingly channeled from the past, its ghostly keys, and its endless waves of despondent riffs with warped and dissonant chords pushing through the cracks. Indeed, said band’s members M. Hater and I. Stellarghost provide guest vocals and synths elsewhere on the album, and a stylistic overlap between the bands is evident throughout.
‘Starlit- A Rude Awakening’ is another oddball, starting with a more gothic doom approach, opening with rich, warmth-tinged guitars with a sorrowful, folksy lilt to them, plunging then into abyssal funereal territory before climbing back up with a completely unexpected toe-tapping goth-dance break that stalls and fragments as suddenly as it appears. Instrumental ‘Starlit- We Rest At Last’ makes for a fitting closer; stark, drawn-out melodic laments recall Ahab, or perhaps Esoteric’s ‘Maniacal Vale’, whilst the surging, euphoric bridge with fluid, building drums makes me want to dig out Isis’s ‘Panopticon’.
A wholly solid album, ‘Overhead…’ took a good few listens to really sink in, but sink in it did. Bleak and barren but also frequently delicate, it’s a lonely, spaced-out listen full of sparse passages of plunging despair, akin to glimpsing the twinkling nocturnal lights of some deserted outpost as it’s swallowed up by a cold expanse of snow and sky.
(8/10 Erich Zann)
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