So, I’d heard some Tomb Mold in the past, and in fairness it’s been pretty hard not to have notice them on Metal Twitter (or X, as ham-fizzoged ethics-averse replicant Elon Musk has renamed it), as they’re often spoken about as being a real prospect, despite being essentially inactive for a few years. In the past listens I found them to be perfectly listenable, albeit not – to my ears at least – particularly memorable.
Now, four years since 2019’s “Planetary Clairvoyance”, they’ve returned with a fresh helping of seven new tracks on “The Enduring Spirit”. The Canadian’s have certainly injected a new approach into their music. “The Enduring Spirit” is a proggy old beast; riffs pop out and poke out at weird, angular positions, and phrases spin off at weird times. All of this newfound progginess is delivered in the method of an old-school death metal band. It’s like Autopsy found some early Genesis records and decided to record them whilst on acid.
If that sounds like your kind of thing, well, you’re in luck. About halfway through third track, “Will of Whispers”, the extra-dimensional ultra-gnarly death metal metal-of-all-fuzz riffing abruptly gives way to clean, daintily played jazz. Following this discombobulation, the music then gets back to throwing haymakers and filthy axework before the two come back and fight each other. Ever wanted to hear avant-garde jazz guitarists duel old school death metal six-stringers? No, me neither as it goes, but to be fair it’s actually much more interesting and enjoyable than that probably reads on paper.
Elsewhere, the music is a little more standard, such as on rager “Flesh as Armour”, which is a dense and oppressive pure death metal track that is the sonic equivalent of recording yourself falling down the stairs. It has an outro that’s absolutely crackers mind you – strange synth noises and bizarre soundscapes against the heft.
I have grown to like the album. I will confess to finding it pretty frustrating on the first few listens – every time they seemed to get into an interesting space, the music would turn on a sixpence and skew into something else. On repeated listens though, I am forced to admit that the experimentation here, whilst not universally effective (the mid-section of the closer “The Enduring Spirit of Calamity” sounds to me like the instrumental section of a plaintive shot of an eighties detective film), it is at least trying to do something different. When it works, it’s like nothing else that’s currently out there. In some senses, I think I’m still getting my head around it, and so whilst my review scoring is this today, in six months time it may be something else entirely.
There’s a lot to get your head around here. A lot.
(7.5/10 Chris Davison)
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