I was really expecting obsidian blackness from this Polish band and that’s what I got but with it a whole lot more. This is a debut album from the band who contain members of the much lauded Outre as well as other underground denizens from the likes of the intriguing sounding Whalesong, Unipolar Manic-Depressive Psychosis, Got No Soul and an ex Thaw member amongst others. The album cover here suggested something cold, grey and dead and I anticipated a labyrinthine journey into a crepuscular tomb like world but I didn’t have a clue of how I was exactly going to find myself heralded into its depths.
What we have on this are 5 long anti-hymns that have a feel of orthodoxy about them before throwing the rulebook straight out the window. This is certainly not black metal per se but it dwells as equally in the worlds of doom, sludge, drone and jazz. The added surprise is found and established quickly with a sinister spiralling icy blast of saxophone and it’s the funereal and avant-garde tendencies of the instrument that really flourishes around these echoing catacombs. Its dirge filled presence adds a touch of grim life to the other dead like vice grips of the slow pounding and sombre tones within and it is fair to say if it is not an instrument you care for you should avoid this like the veritable plague. Shrieking along discordantly in the background are distempered shrieks from vocalist Kvass and the whole impact is unsettling in the extreme, especially when you take this as a whole and discover there is not much in a change of pace or style throughout the whole of the 37 minute album. There is little differential from track to track and you have no choice but to settle down from the opening strains of ‘Daymare’ and tango on down until the album is done with you.
The band’s Facebook describe their music as “Drone Jazz from the hellyard” and I couldn’t improve upon the description if I tried. It’s like a dreadful cacophony of the damned with traces heard from the likes of Shining Norway, Sigh, City Of Diss and obviously jazz bands who I am not versed in so could not namedrop into things. If you play this at volume it will shake the very foundations and have chunks of plaster falling from the roof and walls as I very nearly discovered to my mistake as I played this and rode on the layers of drone. I can only assume the neighbours went out in disgust, not that I heard them slamming the door and then the sky turned a shade of very bruised black. The repetitiousness from track to track is what will turn most off here and I can imagine a lot of people hating this, it’s an album that will divide opinion with little in the way of middle ground. I did find that ‘Christoff Waltz’ the third number did see an intensity brewing with the vocals being upped in the mix and being that bit more strident but apart from that this relentlessly just keeps stalking away driving you further into submission. Want to try it out yourself, enter the tomb at the following link but don’t say I didn’t warn you to tread very carefully.
(7/10 Pete Woods)
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