As with their stunning debut album ‘The Call Of The Wretched Sea’ Ahab have taken literary inspiration for this album. Rather than Moby Dick this time around it’s William Hope Hodgeson’s 1907 novel which the album takes its title from. A horror tale in essence and one about survivors from a doomed voyage of discovery, it is a book that I really intended to immerse myself in as an accompaniment to the listening experience but as with Melville’s classic I never got quite round to doing so. It is something that I fully intend to do so in the future and will have no trouble in dipping back into the album when I do have the novel in front of me. One thing is certain as far as taking a musical subgenre to its nadir there are few better than Ahab and their brand of ‘nautical funeral doom.’
I have had this for some time, setting myself up with a first listen just before the band played an excellent show in London at the beginning of July. There I was rewarded with one of its five gargantuan tracks (actually the shortest one) and the album has had plenty of plays since. ‘The Isle’ starts with a passage that can only be described as blissful, dreamy nirvana, far removed from the coming and anticipated storm. It’s light, airy and fragrant melodic strumming reminiscent of Pink Floyd or that famous song about a bird coasting over an endless ocean, tinged with clean and heartfelt vocals from Daniel Droste. Just as you are in its zone the anchor drops and weight is solidly brought into the harmonic picture. An oppressive ballast rears gradually into those leviathan roars, gurgling like a drowning man desperate to get out a last breath beneath the choppy waves. The essence of funeral doom is there although not as stifling and repetitive as many practitioners of the craft, Ahab have kind of gone beyond that and the somewhat repetitive nature of the genre counterpoising moments of supreme heftiness with a barren fragility, one that again comes back to play just after a mighty roaring is unleashed. Listening to it you really do feel cast aside on a wooden raft in the middle of the ocean going between periods of churning ‘clinging on for dear life’ tumult and calm and arid ‘sunburnt and dying for fresh water’ hopelessness. Naturally songs are long and there is plenty about them to make the journey all the more immersive. An almost Opethian gentleness balances one track straight into another and the strangely entitled ‘The Thing That Made Search’ glistens and shimmers in an acoustic folk etched peaceful flow that makes you think perhaps rescue has been made. No such luck as the “many flapped Thing” itself swoops preying on any survivors and installing the hoary doom again. Although I have not read the aforementioned book I have in the past ploughed through what I guess is a very similar update by Dan Simmonds called ‘The Terror’ based upon The Franklin Expedition and can see this tying in perfectly with the musical narrative here.
That live track ‘Red Foam’ (The Great Storm) does what you would anticipate with rocking and rolling drums setting things up for a tumultuous, timber shaking 6 minute experience, one that you wonder if anyone will make it out alive from. Some clean classic doom laden vocals make it far from one-dimensional and the atmosphere is palpable with brutality and melody totally working in co-ordination with each other. At 15 minutes long ‘The Weedmen’ submerges you straight into its locker with the album’s slowest movement floating straight down into its briny depths. As the vocals gurgle inhumanly it is kind of hard to grab a breath until it lightens into a hypnotic and almost psychedelic passage that makes me wonder if the bends have set in. From the track title to the dangerous and sinister overtones of the music there is definitely fear and dread within this one and perhaps there is an inadvertent reason that compelled me to watch John Carpenter’s The Fog last night prior to reviewing this. It could well be the soundtrack to a similar nightmare. One thing that’s certain here is that the roars of the vocals have never sounded fuller and better at full velocity here and with the stalking and slashing riff work this is a track that really delivers making me hope that in the future they well play it live. Not done quite yet though as there is still the not much shorter and no less epic ‘To Mourn Job’ still to drown yourself in, but I’m not going to spoil the last chapter for you!
Having said that it would appear that there is an extra track ‘The Light in the Weed (Mary Madison)’ which was not on my review download and I guess on the special edition. There is also apparently an Alan Parsons Project cover “The Turn Of A Friendly Card’ vocalised by Sahg’s Olav Iverson knocking around too in a special 7’ box set. Whether you need these extras with the album itself being such a fully enriching experience is subject to debate but it can’t really hurt can it? This is the Ahab album I have enjoyed most since the debut and it’s pretty much going to be an essential purchase in my book. The cover art itself makes it worthy of splashing out on (no pun intended).
(8.5/10 Pete Woods)
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