Hailing from Ireland, where (despite protestations to the contrary) the weather is even worse than it is here in the UK and although I haven’t been able to visit (part of my work takes me to Ireland at least once a month for the last ten years), my friends and family over there for a while, they will concur that their weather is often a crushingly, dispiriting ghoul of a thing, that stares you in the face and sucks out your soul, messes with your moral compass and plucks at your bones like a spiritual harp.  Now I may have been lacking an entertaining, clever and inspiring introduction, but the more I think about it, the more there are aspects of this meteorology malevolence in this debut album from Soothsayer, that remind me of a Monday morning walk to work in Ballycollin, Dublin facing the torrential rain and howling wind. It’s almost as if the ferments are screaming at me ‘Tar isteach ón bhfearthainn’ ‘It’s nice and warm here (it isn’t), come join us amongst the dead’. And although that may seem a little dramatic, (certainly for a Monday morning), the further you penetrate, absorb, and ingest the six deep, dense and creeping tracks on Echoes of the Earth, the more it gets under your skin.

It’s even more astonishing really, that despite two EPs and having been in existence since 2013, ‘Echoes of the Earth’ is Soothsayer’s debut fell length effort and belies their relative inexperience (musical output-wise) as they have conspired to conjure a moody, contemplative, and stirring body of work, that grows upon you like a fungal infection on each further application. It’s classic sludge/doom recording that revels in its sparse production and sound that’s not unlike other classics in this genre and it sounds like it was recorded in an empty swimming pool, on a disused compound of a murdered Mexican drug boss with one microphone, tied to a Condor circling the estate. It often baffles me, certainly in this genre, why the production/recording always seems to be so low-fi and remote. Maybe the lack of warmth is intentional, which adds to the, at times, suffocating, cloying and icy terror that seems to resonate within this genre, adding a frisson of the dead and the dammed to proceedings.

The album starts as it means to continue, setting out it’s stall early, with a slow, plodding trudge through mud caked fields replete with Gregorian chanting that slowly builds into a hideous wave of chaotic and moribund human existence, scraping the marrow from your soul as it goes. Opening song ‘Fringe’ is the aural definition of disquiet and it’s quite the curtain raiser, representing a ballsy way to kick things off in such a low key, dark, dank and frankly terrifying way, coming across as part Clive Barker’s worst hell-bound heresy and Santa’s workshop on January 3rd, when Santa is loaded on ketamine and cheap gin and is threating to top himself.

Things do pick up, tempo wise from there though and what comes, is a cavalcade of precision tooled, doom/sludge vignettes that are dense but with a deliciously bitter piquant that have the sepulchral stench of Black Metal, replete with operatic screams, howls and growls that also seem to segue here and there into Death Metal pastures and gamble around like sheep on magic mushrooms. Certainly on ‘Cities of Smoke’ blast beats appear, like a drowning sailors final gasp of air before being enveloped into their watery grave. Whilst things do go all a bit BM for a bit, that soon retreats back into its decrepit shell as the sludge, grist, gruel and griminess returns with both barrels, as the pace slackens into a filthy grease that coats all before it, leaving you feeling like you need a bath in some Swarfega.

This album switches genres so quickly back and forth like a hooker’s hand, so vigorously within the tracks here, that it can leave your head spinning like you’ve been sitting on a park bench since lunchtime sniffing glue and snaffling White Lightening by the barrel. But it must be said that the vast majority of what is offered up here, is an excellent example of the Doom/Sludge genre that as far as indicators go, bodes extremely well for Soothsayer, who have produced an epic, maelstrom of dank smelling treats.

(7.5/10 Nick Griffiths)

https://www.facebook.com/soothsayerdoom

https://soothsayer.bandcamp.com/album/echoes-of-the-earth-atmospheric-doom-sludge-metal