REVIEW: SERVANTS OF THE MIST - SUICIDE SEX PACT

Tampa, FL may not seem like the doom capital of the world, with their sunshine and delicious oranges and all that, but then a band like Servants of the Mist comes along with Suicide Sex Pact, an EP so bleak and filthy that it blocks the light traveling from dying stars and rots fruit from the trees.

From the opening uneasy clean singing of a passage from “Jesus Loves Me,” which captures the same creepy melancholia as Harvey Milk’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” Servants of the Mist create a world where light is long-extinct and hope’s been violently snuffed. Album opener “Absence” introduces their scorched funeral doom, which sounds like the aural equivalent of finger painting with urn ash on a canvas of stretched skin torn from a dead priest’s back. This sort of pitch-black doom inspires thoughts of Bongripper and Cough, mixed with the drama of early My Dying Bride.

“Behind the Curtain” continues the band’s glacial determination with uncompromising heaviness. I wasn’t able to truly conceive of canyons being carved by icy structures until I heard the riff in this song. It feels a little like Evoken, if their songs were trapped in endless hallucinogen-fueled night terrors. The lead guitar in this song and album closer “Suicide Sex Pact” didn’t feel totally committed, with wavering hints of bluesy groove that fizzle instead of sizzle. This is the only aspect of the latter two songs that make me question if they totally earn the song length (none of the songs are briefer than 9 minutes). Fortunately, I’m willing to forgive 2 minutes among 30 when the rest of the album features guitar fuzz thicker than a blanket used to smother plague victims in their sleep. Richard Smyth Jr.’s vocals could scrape muscle from bone like an autopsy instrument, with curdling shrieks and meaty growls that give way to a no-wave gothic chant about 25 minutes into the album for a brief reprieve from ferocity. The breakdown of slow motion death rock slams back into relentless tomb-smashing doom before the feedback lifts like smoke and dust, revealing a pile of lifeless nude bodies.

With audio collage work reminiscent of Eyehategod’s more experimental passages and a muscular, bass-heavy attack that invokes Primitive Man and Conan, Suicide Sex Pact should interest fans of the loud, mean, and ugly. Maybe those aren’t adjectives I’d use on a dating profile, but when it comes to extreme metal, that’s love at first sight.

Go check out Servants of the Mist on Facebook and follow their updates as release information surfaces for Suicide Sex Pact:  https://www.facebook.com/servantsofthemist

Check out a preview of the title track over here: https://soundcloud.com/hbnbm/servants-of-the-mist-suicide

REVIEW: FÓRN - S/T EP

Welcome to the first (unofficial) language lesson here at Mister Growl. Today we’re learning a few words that will assist you with appreciating some of the grimmest doom in New England. When first seeing the band name Fórn I made the sort of gut-level assumption that at best leads to ridicule and at worst leads to fatal misunderstandings. I thought that Fórn was perhaps a Celtic word meaning “forlorn,” or some other somber adjective. It’s actually an Icelandic word referring to a ceremonial sacrifice, meaning that in very specific, dangerous company, I could have accidentally been part of a tragic Wicker Man-type situation. Basically what I’m trying to say is that Fórn almost killed me.

And that was even before it came to their music, which is lethal as well. This is the sort of pitch-black funeral sludge that feels like the natural extension of the earliest days of extreme metal tape-trading, where primeval growls and heaviness seemed like they contained the most evil forces from musical history contained in a disarmingly innocent-looking cassette. Fórn has fused the ugly ambience of those recordings (without mimicking the notoriously poor sound quality) with the blackened sludge of Grief and Cough.

This two-track debut EP begins with “Coiled, Alone,” a lurching horror film of a song that even invokes the macabre slow-motion death metal of Hooded Menace before spinning off into nightmarish soundscape territory, complete with a shrieking wall of atmospheric guitar feedback and background vocals that sound like someone’s skin is being peeled like a grapefruit. The EP’s closer, “Dasein,” is a 9+ minute slab of nastiness that surprises with some killer grooves that could fit in a Bongzilla song. For those curious linguists (like me), “dasein” is a German word used extensively in Martin Heidegger’s writings regarding existential philosophy, “dasein” refers to a German phrase that means “being there,” or in other words, existing in a human capacity. For those of you looking for our one degree of separation between Peter Sellers and Boston sludge, you just found it. If another lifeform visited Earth and found “Dasein” as the lone evidence of human existence, they would likely believe that humans were massive, horned, cannibalistic creatures that trolled around bleak wastelands sucking the dried eyeballs and tongues from the deceased. Fórn play riffs so heavy they feel like they can’t be lifted from the floor, much like bands such as Winter or Conan, but with barbarity rarely this visceral. I can’t wait to hear more from this quintet, despite the music sounding like a fitting soundtrack for the mass-feeding of Christian babies to a black-tongued swamp creature. Did I type despite? Who am I kidding, anyone who has read this blog more than once knows that Christian baby buffets are pretty much my main jam.

Check out this EP over at Fórn’s Bandcamp and order one of their beautiful tapes: http://forn.bandcamp.com/album/ep

And go follow them on Facebook for news on shows and future releases: https://www.facebook.com/Forndoom

REVIEW: BONGRIPPER / CONAN - SPLIT

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 the Conan track is streaming yonder:  http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/15163-conan-beheaded/

And pre-order from Holy Roar Records over here: http://holyroarrecords.com/album.php?id=2010&shop=1