Warning,
this may be the first and last time Anne Hathaway has been referenced
in a doom metal review. While AMC theaters were pushing promo hype for Les Miserables
this past year I must have seen their 7 minute making-of featurette
twenty times. It really didn’t matter what sort of movie I was seeing,
AMC felt it was an appropriate regardless of genre. Nothing pumps you up
for a bloody action flick or a supernatural chiller quite like Russell
Crowe in a Napoleon hat. As much as I resented being forced to see this
promo video so many times there was one line from Hathaway describing
her ill-fated character that came to mind while listening to the
Bongripper/Conan split album: “She's literally at the bottom of a hole
and realizing she's never going to climb out of this.”
There’s
a prevailing sense of hopelessness in both of these tracks, but
Bongripper’s Side B offering “Zero Talent” truly captures the horrific
disintegration of joy. Even the song title feels like someone who has
cut their own worth down to nothingness. The track begins with droning
ambience, like a room-tone in some desolate futurescape of dilapidated
office buildings filled with skeletons where the only sounds are the
computers that keep eerily humming. Once the riffs drop from the sky
they land with enough force to sink continents. The guitars are weighed
down by suffocating pessimism, crawling forward through glass shards and
rat shit through cobbled streets where the dreamless wait to die. “Zero
Talent” also pops an upper late in the song and rampages at about a
million times their normal speed, blasting forward and suddenly halting
with a vicious stop-and-go pattern that bruises brains like slapping the
listener’s skulls against a truck windshield. It’s a nasty slab of
grimy depression that should be the bright spot in every doom fan’s
year.
Conon’s
track, titled “Beheaded,” also plows through the muck at a
frighteningly low speed, tasting the sewage as it shuffles deeper into a
steaming fecal swamp. There was once a moment when I saw Winter play
and felt like the distortion seeping from the towering speakers was
crushing me into the ground. It was like the gravity in the venue was
exponentially increasing each minute, threatening to flatten me across
the cement floor and squeeze the precious fluids from my skin. Conan’s
entire discography reproduces that feeling. If you’re looking for pure,
unrelenting heaviness, the type of sound that feels like the widening
anvil shadow right before impact, then Conan is your lethargic jam.
While I usually think of decapitation as a swift punishment this song
feels like someone is just pulling their enemy’s head off with their
bare hands, working at it patiently with fingernails and brute strength.
The song doesn’t offer much in riff ingenuity or tempo shifts, but it
does transport listeners into a slow-motion world painted with dried
blood and fresh shit. It’s not pretty or clean, but there are people who
will feel completely at home there.
I
also want to mention here that both of these bands will be terrorizing
audiences in Conan’s home country, commencing a nine day tour towards
the end of the month. If you can check out these bands and survive
without feeling like their bass guitars laid a demon egg in your stomach
I commend you.
Listen to Bongripper’s track here: http://www.invisibleoranges.com/2013/03/exclusive-song-stream-bongripper-zero-talent/
And pre-order from Holy Roar Records over here: http://holyroarrecords.com/album.php?id=2010&shop=1
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