I won’t go into my usual mutterings about how hard it is to do justice to H P Lovecraft through music here. Instead I’ll start with the fact that Dutch band Swampcult are at least really going for it. Full blown mythos cultists they have decided with their second album to not simply do a concept album but to base it on one of Lovecraft’s earlier and slightly less well known tales – one which has to me always read like a first try-out for the later infamous ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’.
Sound wise, Swampcult have a lovely dirty guitar sound. Mired in filth and stagnant water, this is a death/doom trawl coated in brackish pond scum and thick black tar. Vocals have a fair bit of Tom Warrior about them; varied cries and growls, grunts and garbled whispers that are a great vehicle for the insanity herein. And that’s the key – the wrongness. Combined with the relatively lo-fi production and the ponderous, dragging weight of the old school riffs, the twisted sense of rambling, obsessive narrator insanity works really well in pulling in the atmosphere. It really is a strangely vocal driven album (making the absence of a lyric sheet with the review copy all the more frustrating even if I did re-read the story along to it). Downtuned guitar melodies twist and circle around atmospheric backing vocals and odd sounds of thick gurgling waters and distant winds as our narrator obsessively mumbles, snaps and mutters his way through his tale. Curious dark musical passages combining scraped guitars and piano, sudden laughter, relentless riffs: All good.
There is a heavy Celtic Frost influence here, particularly on opening track ‘The Village’ which combines the primitive sound of Morbid Tales with the more experimental arrangements of To Mega Therion, with Swampcult’s own gibberings swirled in. It’s all rather impressive, not to mention hypnotic. It has a sense of something dark sliding through mud and silt and night skies with sick stars you don’t quite recognise.
It is also very much a concept album; something you listen to all the way through rather than dip into and it works very well as that. Occasionally there is the impression that, rather like a radio play, the music is just there to enable the travel of the words rather than the two being wrapped up inseperably, but even that can work depending on your mood.
It’s well worth hunting down, and also getting that physical copy as Swampcult have a great eye for visuals too and I’d hope that the absent lyrics would also be included which would enhance the experience of The Festival.
Swampcult are most definitely in a place where “..things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.” Join them.
(7.5/10 Gizmo)
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