Dear reader, kindly indulge me as I take you back to the days of my youth. It’s the eighties, and whilst the airwaves were full of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, and the Rave and Indie scene were soon to give birth to their bastard child in “Madchester”, me and my circle of friends were drinking shit like Strongbow and partying to the sounds of Judas Priest, Motorhead, Saxon, and the up and coming sound of Thrash played by those young pretenders Metallica and Slayer.  However, at many of these gatherings there was, late at night, a transition into “The Pink Floyd” phase of the party, a phase where headbanging to metal was replaced by sitting, chilling and chatting to less urgent music, a phase that was precipitated by the knock on the door by the local constabulary after a noise complaint.  What the hell does that have to do with Garden of Worm, I metaphorically hear you ask?  Well, if a rip had occurred in the space-time continuum and their new album ‘Endless Garden’ had fallen back from 2022 to about 1986, said parties may well have entered “The Garden of Worm” phase.

Following on at a leisurely pace from their 2015 release ‘Idle Stones’ (see Ave Noctum passim), Garden of Worm have slowly drifted ever further away from traditional doom into the realms of the more psychedelic, opening with a gentle instrumental number ‘Hands Up, You’re Free’, but hidden amongst the sitar like strumming and pastoral flutes, there are hints of dark things lurking just below the surface, waiting to emerge.  ‘Name of Lost Love’ ups the pace, screaming of the occult rock of Black Widow that hides a menace amongst the jangly guitars and harmonised vocals; yes, the sounds could well lull you to sleep, but do not expect pleasant dreams.  The same retro sound continues with ‘The Flood’, the discordant ending offering up their own take on a musical summoning, all before their ‘White Ship’ sails through a beautiful but dangerous realm redolent of the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, the intensity of the track ebbing and flowing like a mystical sea.

Things get more trippier still with ‘Autumn Song’, combining experimental rock with proto-Prog sounds to draw the listener into an acid laced darkness that bleeds into the melancholy of ‘Heart’s Waste’.  This is all leading up to the epic composition ‘Sleepy Trees’, the opening drum beats so like the effortless and simultaneously loose but precise beats of a young Nick Mason, the laconic vocals not kicking in until the near two and a half minute mark where most of the interchangeable pap of popular chart music has likely finished. This is a number that just demands to be played in a darkened and smoky hall with the band illuminated only by a liquid light show as they lure the audience through their own doors of perception, before the whole is rounded out by ‘In The Absence of Memory’, a track that is half Monkee’s Haight-Asbury rock and half MC5 sneer.

Whether Garden of Worm will ever sally forth from Finland to tour, I do not know; what I do know is that with ‘Endless Garden’ they have created an album with a dark beauty akin to their homeland, and one that will deserve regular spins on the players of dyed in the wool retronauts and explorers of the arcane alike.

(8.5/10 Spenny)

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