Stomping forth like an unstoppable leviathan, the cyclopean Canuck doom machine that is Lavagoat has again delivered a concrete heavy slab of sonic misery, the long winters of their native Canada inspiring an outlook and sound that makes the likes of Electric Wizard seem positively chipper and upbeat by comparison. Released at the start of December 2014 but only making its way across the Atlantic to me this week, ‘Ageless Nonsense’ is their latest opus, nine songs, each of which frankly could lead to be charged with assault, such is their battering heaviness.
Opening track ‘Ageless Nonsense’ lumbers from the blocks, bruising the speakers with leaden riffs and hoarsely screamed vocals, its approach indeed ageless, but far from nonsense. As on previous releases, the vocals manage to be harsh enough to satisfy the corpse painted kvlt warriors of metal, whilst still being comprehensible enough to have the lyrics of a Lovecraftian nightmare etch themselves onto the fore brain of the listener. Indeed, just like prior releases such as their eponymous album and EPs such as ‘Monoliths of Mars’, the band draw heavily on the influences of the great writers of weird fiction such as HPL and Clark Ashton Smith, dark fantasy seeping through each track, backed up by riffs that would have Tony Iommi flinching at their sheer power. ‘Worms of the Earth’ highlights an obvious love of early Sabbath with the added depth of a twin guitar attack, before the listener is bludgeoned into kneeling like a dog before the onslaught of ‘Santanico Pandemonium’, a more than suitably evil metal tribute to the raven haired queen of vampires from Robert Rodriguez’s ‘From Dusk ‘Til Dawn’, and I mean the original, not the watered down TV series.
The sword and sorcery of the lands of Conan the Barbarian are bought to life in ‘Ice Giants’, a song resurrected from an earlier collections of demos released as ‘Tower of the Elephant’, the sound now fuller, fleshed out out with deeper and darker guitar tones and a flurry of drums designed to bring avalanches to the mountains of the frozen north-lands. This worship of the works of Robert E Howard continues with ‘Cauldron’, ‘Black Lotus’, and ‘Cimmerian Fury’, each evoking a different story from the body of work of that short lived author from the golden age of pulp fiction. However, don’t expect the high camp posturing of the Arnie movies in either the stories or this album; both the books and this album in particular are of a far darker, uncaring, and unforgiving nature, albeit it in ‘Black Lotus’ in particular, set to a neck wrecking riff forged from iron to have head banging.
To close the album Lavagoat put together the eleven minute plus majesty of ‘Trans Arctic Gulfs’, a number that goes from the hypnotic opening of blended guitars and Hammond organ into a cannonade of riffs before again spiralling into near psychedelic instrumental breaks before closing with a wall of menacing effects.
In the ten years that they have been going, and the five years since I first laid hands on one of their CDs, Lavagoat have continued to develop their power and brutality without the aid of label support, producing the sort of underground music so ignored by the mainstream, and championed by the likes of this webzine you are reading. If you haven’t heard them before, here is your chance; just click on the links below, and revel in what is maybe the most honest of musical forms, one that is produced for the sheer thrill of it.
(8.5/10 Spenny)
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