Okay folks, without having even heard of the band, the first thing I noticed when I loaded this album from American doom outfit Windhand, even before I’d played the album, was the fact that the final track, ‘Boleskine’, was listed as over 30 minutes in length. Normally, a listing like that on an electronic device means that there is a hidden track with a 20 minute gap of silence to forward through. Not so with Windhand on their Relapse debut ‘Soma’. So, if you are a devotee of the 3 minute commercial “verse, chorus, verse” style of music, move along, there is nothing for you here; however, if you like your music epic, read on.
The shortest track on the album, at just a little shy of seven minutes, is the opener ‘Orchard’, the closest the album has to a single, if such a heresy could be considered. Oozing from the speakers with a positively hypnotic riff, and psychedelic lyrics of the futility of religion, this track sets the tone for the whole album; don’t set yourself up for a mosh, rather dose yourself in alcohol and THC and be ready to nod along to massively laid back stoner rock. Think Electric Wizard, but without the urgency, if such a concept is possible!
‘Woodbine’ follows with an equally hazy blast of fuzzy guitars and bass, layered over a dragging drum beat with the vocals becoming part of the tripping whole, pretty much another instrument, rather than a distinctive and separate entity. Even the guitar solo, laden with distortion doesn’t so much thrust to the front of the mix as just gently appear with a trippy nonchalance, the track finishing with an extended instrumental drone. Nothing in this album is hurried or urgent, with the gentle acoustic guitar strum and ethereal vocals of ‘Evergreen’ helping to set ‘Soma’ apart from so many other doom and stoner LPs that just substitute exaggerated bass lines for innovation, although the band are not averse to battering their audience with a four string assault in their penultimate track ‘Cassock’, by far the heaviest and most traditional doom track of the album.
And so, after an epic journey through tracks 1 – 5, the faithful listener comes upon the half hour plus epic of ‘Boleskine’; opening with a combination of a howling wind and more dragged out acoustic guitar work, the sound so lightly and subtly engineered that every movement of the guitarist’s fingers dragging along the strings is heard, this is a track that is worthy of its own album. The first five tracks of the album could have been distilled and concentrated to make this last epic number: the drums batter out like the staggering beat of a dying heart; the bass and guitars merge into a somnambulant haze, and Dorthia Cottrell’s vocals merge into the fuzzy whole of the band’s entire experiment in mesmerism.
This is not an album to inspire a pit of flying hair and elbows, rather it is one that screams out for an oil lamp light show and nod along admiration. When I first listened through I gave a score of 7/10, but with listen after listen the many subtleties of the performance just grow and grow. This November the band are hitting the UK for two shows with Pilgrim, and I know I will be doing my best to catch this act live.
(8.5/10 Spenny)
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