Here’s the thing, sludge bands. You know that bit where you spend anywhere upwards of five minutes playing the same note or chord slowly over a fuzzed out backdrop? Well it sounds exactly like every other band who ever did it ever. At all. In the history of ever. And if you then add in vocals that bark a word or two each chord for the next five minutes guess what again? Yeah. That’s ten minutes you’ve just wasted that could have been used to establish your own identity. You see this simple stuff is hard; very hard. Anyone can do it but only a few can do it well. And when you break out of that single-strike passage you really better have something musical to say.
Where do Walk Through Fire sit in this debate? Well middling to be honest. This is the Swede’s third full length in five-ish year’s so they must know where they want to go and that kind of work rate for this kind of music has to be respected as most punters won’t really have a clue as to how hard it is to keep on doing the underground stuff. They have a good, low down sludge sound and that tight feel that still leaves you thinking that the darkness and pissed off anger they strive to put across might, just might, rip them apart and drag them into primal chaos. The vocals howl in a righteous pissed off manner, the filth and tar lies thick on the snail’s pace riff. The problem is not just that I’ve heard this all before; as I have said before originality can be overrated. The problem is that there is so little variation here, precious little light and shade (or crepuscule and tar pit if you like) and little I can hand on heart say sounds only like Walk Through Fire. You get four minutes of semi-acoustic funereal plucked repetitive strings on ‘Next To Nothing’ and eleven minutes of similar on piano for the closing track but, really that’s it fit variation and even those tracks stick very much to their own repetitions. And the album is a whopping eighty minutes of slow punishing sludge overall. I try and I try but nothing here makes me feel I am travelling with them through some post-industrial landscape or waiting for the end in some rotting concrete block. I just don’t get it, I’m afraid and for me it goes nowhere. I just cannot break through what feels like a cloying barrier of generic sludge in an overlong, frighteningly daunting package.
In its favour, this is actually well played. Really it is despite the above points. They have the tone spot on and they are full of conviction and they bite down slow and hard. Nothing wrong with them as a band, simply the album they have presented. If you are a sludge fanatic then come on and walk through the flames with them; maybe you will be kindred spirits and maybe I’m talking bollocks. I’ll just wait here at the bar though, I think. It’s plainly not for me. Sorry guys.
(4.5/10 Gizmo)
https://www.facebook.com/walkthroughfire
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