Tracklist:
01. Ghost Plains
02. Moths
03. The Flock
04. Grindstone
05. Sunday Mass Grave
06. Orphans
07. Reaper Christ
08. White Braid
09. Recitation Fire
10. Part 2
I had first heard of Seven sisters of Sleep two years ago, back in 2011, when it was praised highly by Jason Campbell aka JGCsound an internet reviewer who specialises in Grind, Hardcore and Sludge. Unfortunately I didn’t really agree with his views and thought of the band as a very dull Eyehategod clone, I was surprised then that the band now was getting a lot of buzz and many people were actually anticipating this album. To be honest I had mixed feelings about this, I was worried that this might turn out to be abysmal and a tedious listen but I was hopeful as well, maybe the buzz was true. Thankfully it was… oh yes it was!!
Start streaming the entire album while you read out the review 🙂
Seven Sisters of Sleep are a five piece from California. The kind of music they play can be described as a very harsh mix of hardcore/sludge ,with the extremely distorted ,very dirty, very beefy sounding guitars that use a lot of gain and have a lot of low end on them that just trap you in a suffocating wall of sound . It literally gives you no room to breath , you are either being hit by speeding bursts of molten lava or are slowly beaten to death by a massive rock which breaks every bone in your body. The vocals add to the atmosphere a lot, switching from unholy monstrous growls to torturous screams to more traditional hardcore vocals. Now although the band is undeniably brutal , they do balance that with their simple yet sophisticated songwriting and every song even though has the same main characteristics, it is quite different from the other and maintains its own identity, this is exemplified in Grindstone which adds some crust punk to the mix, Reaper Christ which sees the band experiment with their sound using some Death Metal and a slight touch of stoner towards the end and Witch Braid which has a certain part where the band uses double bass drums over traditional heavy/doom metal riffing. But what intrigued me most about this band are their transitions which seem very organic . The band blends both the parts to their song and the two genres seamlessly , knowing exactly when and what to play, not once sounding mechanical or rehearsed, almost like a jam band. It seems that they don’t talk much about what to play and what would come next in the jam room, they just play.
Now.. I know a lot of what have said seems rather sadistic, but honestly I found the experience quite exciting. Seven Sisters of Sleep have come a long way from where they first began and it shows in this album. They definitely deserve all the buzz they are getting and I wouldn’t mind creating some of it for them.
1. Digital Critic
2. What If…
3. Late For An Early Grave
4. Fading Flower
5. Thorn In The Flesh
6. Teacher
7. Love Song For The Dying
8. Never Surrender
It was no big surprise when Victor Griffin walked out on Pentagram (again) after the Last Rites kinda-reunion album. Pentagram’s central figure and visionary, frontman Bobby Liebling has never been an easy person to work with, by all accounts, and it’s unlikely that the classic line-up of Liebling, Hasselvander, Griffin and Swaney will ever play together again for any extended period of time. More surprising was Victor Griffin’s decision to pull up stakes and disband his long-running act, Place Of Skulls. Your ability to appreciate or ignore that band’s frequently faith-influenced lyrics (Griffin isn’t just a high priest of the heavy guitar; he’s also a devout Christian) may vary, but the music was always right on target: heavy, dark and distinctly doomy. Nonetheless, Griffin has decided to make a fresh start with a new band, albeit one with many familiar conspirators on board, at least in the studio. These include drummer Pete Campbell, former Trouble bassist Jeff Olson on organ and a smorgasboard of bassists who’ve played with bands like 50 Watt Shaman, Goatsnake, Acid King and of course Pentagram.
So what makes this band different from Place Of Skulls? Perhaps not all that much; for one thing, I’ve heard that a couple of these songs have been in Griffin’s kitty for more than two decades, so it isn’t like everything here has been created totally from scratch. Such considerations fade away as the thunderous grooves of ‘Digital Critic’ stride into contention. The tone is thick and juicy – vintage Griffin – and the riffs are everything you’d expect from one of the most legendary hard rock/doom metal guitarists in the scene. Griffin’s vocals are assured and powerful, making Bobby Liebling only the third best vocalist of the classic Pentagram line-up. The song is apparently a screed against, er, online critics (like me!), but any faint sense of persecution is rendered insignificant as Griffin unleashes a swirling, hypnotic multi-tracked lead with a fiendishly groovy backing rhythm. ‘What If…’ is a more stately number, where Griffin’s warm, rich melodies are ably backed by Olson’s organ. ‘Late For An Early Grave’ would make a great fit on any vintage Pentagram album, and is a brilliant showcase for Griffin’s lead skills. Whether or not you share or even tolerate Griffin’s faith, it fuelled some very soulful songs on Place Of Skulls and this trend continues with the more downtempo track ‘Fading Flower’. An implacable, lead-footed riff surges like a force of nature, embellished with striving organ chords. Griffin’s vocals are passionate and his soloing is, in a word, divine. Best of all, that morose, melancholy aura you’d quite rightly expect from a doom song is never far away. ‘Thorn in the Flesh’ would have sounded equally in place on a Pentagram album or one by Place Of Skulls, but it’s all good, at least we have a band and an album to listen to an excellent recording of an excellent song. The organ adds another layer of drama to some of Griffin’s rhythmic breaks in the song. The next song is something of a coup – a cover of the early Jethro Tull single, ‘Teacher’, that somehow sounds like it’s been filtered through desert rock. I never thought Tull’s hard rock/metal Grammy was all that undeserved. There’s always been a central core of heaviness running through their music, and it is great hearing Griffin do his stuff with this track. ‘Love Song For The Dying’ is the album’s epic. A thunderous intro dwindles to a sustained organ note before a grinding, lugubrious riff steps in. Griffin’s vocals are dramatic and tuneful. The band is in fine form, pacing themselves through the changes. There are effective organ and guitar solos, but the focus is on the grooves and the lyrics. The song is a massive, brilliant downer, and maybe that’s why Griffin chooses to end the album with a Detroit-style uptempo rocker called ‘Never Surrender’. I understand the impulse, but frankly this song feels a bit slight after the majesty of ‘Love Song For The Dying’.
The album is very well produced, with the caveat that the organ sits rather low in the mix. Just a few notches higher and the music would have preserved its guitar-first focus but which just that little extra bit of texture. Still, it’s Griffin’s band and he calls the shots. I’m not complaining, and neither will you.
…and then there’s music that’s undeniably heavy whether you even want to call it metal or not. If I’d heard that there was a local band with this name, I’d immediately assume it was a collective of burned-out Deadheads and over-the-hill rockers, the sort who guzzle watered-down beer in antediluvian pubs, and serve up a similarly watered-down avatar of the blues. At the risk of sounding prejudiced, when I heard that the band was from Germany, the land of Krautrock, all that changed. And sure enough, the albums ‘Long Distance Trip’ and ‘Revalation & Mystery’ turned out to be ten-tonne slabs of dark, heavy, yet groovy jam rock – and not the Phish/String Cheese Incident flavor of jam rock either. Instead, this is a band that will appeal to devotees of Amon Duul, Ash Ra Tempel, Jimi Hendrix, Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath, Hawkwind, Sleep and Electric Wizard alike.
I’d love to trip out to a band like this live. The mile-wide riffs, the soaring, probing guitar solos, the hypnotic, implacable rhythms and from-a-cloud-of-herbal-smoke vocals demand to be heard live, powering through the most massive PA money, insanity and alchemy can assemble. Owing to geographical limitations, that’s a bit unlikely to happen. Instead, I have to make do with this live platter, which draws even-handedly from both their albums.
The Samsara sound has always had a blend of improvisatory and worked-out passages, and that makes for a satisfying live set, with some things following in the footsteps of the studio version and enough room for live magic. The dual guitar weaving of frontman Christian Peters and Hans Eiselt form the core of the sound, ringing the band through the changes, as on the transition from the spacey ‘Singata Mystical Queen’ into the proto-metal chug of ‘Hangin’ On The Wire’. The Iommian maneuvers of ‘Army of Ignorance’ and ‘Outside Insight Blues’ sound heavier and more foreboding than ever, and make me wonder why more bands that channel this sound don’t have a dual guitar attack. This isn’t the rhythm section-choking bottom-end-heavy dual guitar attack of some American stoner/doom metal bands – instead it is a pretext for some very effective layering and a deepening of texture. Before you think that the band is just another Sabbath clone in Led boots, I must hasten to point out that a song like this one is a perfect example of how you can take the same influences as a hundred, thousand other SG-brandishing, Les Paul-bashing bands and make them your own with the right mix of originality, taste and quirk. Or of quirk, strangeness and charm to quote Hawkwind, a band whose marathon Space Ritual jams are not far from my mind when I listen to this music. ‘For The Lost Souls’ and the epic set-closer ‘Double Freedom’ take us into the more spacey, hard psych side of the band with 70s guitar-hero soliloquies billowing over questing, swirling backing tracks. There’s something of the motorik essence of classic Neu! here, crossed with the warm, chromosomal pulse of the more psyched forays of bands like Ten Years After. And it’s all so crushingly heavy, in its own way. The vocals sometimes dampen the mood a bit, being little more than functional, but at least they are few and far between, and the majesty of the riffs and jams surrounding them is too fundamental to be undermined that easily. ‘Into the Black’ plunges us into the deep end with aggressive soloing and a riff that’s so massive it should have its own gravity field, followed by a groovy uptempo march. It’s like 70s hard rock/proto metal on some very, very good acid and the simultaneous sense of heavy precision and jammy looseness underscore why a live album is such a great idea for this band. The way this song conveys the intensity and danger of early proto-metal without the slavish adherence to the template that so many other bands display is probably a testament to their wider-ranging influences, but it’s also an object lesson in how it’s done, if you’re interested.
View the entire set below
It’s not about copping the ‘Children of the Grave’ groove and having a singer who sounds like the bastard child of Ozzy Osbourne; there’s an almost mystic gravity in this kind of music, something that the Samsara Blues Experiment strike right to the heart of. There is such a thing as setting your focus too narrow; this band’s multiple allegiances to space cruising, blues rocking and garage-ready head bashing allow them to draw on a wider bag of tricks, always putting their own spin on everything and channeling some raw, elemental spirits of their own in the process. That’s why the next track, ‘Center of the Sun’ can sound like some of the more way-out, soaring instrumental jams Hendrix was recording towards the end of his life while still fitting in with the kraut tendencies bubbling around and not contradicting the primal heaviness of the preceding track. This one also has a more marked vocal presence, and it often has the same impact as some of Paul Chain’s syllabic vocals. The song may evoke the sun in its title, but the extended jams evoke the feeling of drifting on a changeable ocean of liquid melody. The album concludes with a studio version of ‘Singata Mystic Queen’, which deploys acoustic guitar across a drone backing. Be sure to light your agarbhati sticks in time for this one!
This is a fine live offering from a band that should appeal to fans of kraut, space rock, stoner metal and psychedelia while maintaining its own identity. It’ll sound equally good as part of a marathon session with the second Blue Cheer session, a later Hendrix compilation album like South Saturn Delta, an early Can or Amon Duul album, Hawkwind’s Space Ritual, Sleep’s Dopesmoker, some Electric Wizard, a selection of Mountain and Ten Years After jams, or best of all, a combination of them all.
Today we have a new reviewer joining our ranks. Old Disgruntled Bastard (check out his personal blog) reviews the new EP from Ara titled ‘The Blessed Sleep‘.
Subjectivity is a word bandied about frequently in music circles. One man’s bread can easily become another’s hemlock, but does such utopian ideology negate the value intrinsic in a piece of art? Passion, conviction, integrity – all words used flippantly to describe music, attributes hardly the sole purview of a particular kind of person, so how then can establishing consensus on certain styles be such a monumental, seemingly hopeless task? Maybe the ways in which we react to music are nothing but an accretion of our life’s experiences; the kind of person you are has to affect your receptivity to the music you’re listening to, the sort of stimuli it is capable of imparting.
But then, is all music deserving of such benevolent interpretation, or is a razing of vaunted ideals of tolerance sometimes warranted? Origin, new Spawn Of Possession – technically adroit behemoths, no doubt, and of itself even striving for sheer technical prowess may be considered a noble pursuit, but is that the same as music?
For me , the bane of modern technical death metal has been the shocking lack, bordering at times on callous disregard, of emotional consonance. The tapestry has been redoubtably intricate but the panorama often reveals a fractured coherence, a central disunity of concept and vision. Far too many ideas jostle for prominence on a crowded canvas ultimately relegating memorability to the background. Araare a young band from Wisconsin that evade the genre’s cosmetic pitfalls better than most; considering that The Blessed Sleep is their first appearance on plastic, this is a promising debut ( a conversation on subjective merits best left for another day).
Stream the entire EP here:
Ara, for the most part, avoid triggering their drums incessantly on this 5 song EP, a personal source of annoyance of mine with most modern death metal. Eric Stenglein’s drumming is spastic and nimble, but it feels organic, and gives the surrounding music a little leg room. And leg room is something it needs, because the guitars, except during a few moments of relative tranquility, are in a perpetually hyperventilating mood, though Jerry Hauppa admirably weaves around the modern-day deadfall of excessive, mind-melting sweeping.
But it is those precious moments when Ara slow down to a more somber pace that reveal the band’s maturity as restrained writers. The songs ‘The Blessed Sleep‘ and ‘Despair Personified’ are the best demonstrations of the band’s assets; the former boasts measured drums that lurch forward into palsied thrashing when needed, the bass shown off in its twanging glory (there is a subtle nod to Cryptopsy on the opener ‘Entitled Ascension’), and an ending melody that could’ve been on ‘The Red In The Sky Is Ours’.
Adam Bujny chooses a consistent hardcore/grunt hybrid here with the occasional layered snarl, and it’s a good choice for the music, recalling Luc Lemay on Obscura. The production is crystal; my personal leanings are towards a muddier sound, but this is technical death metal and the least I can say is that it is balanced well, no instrument winning over another in the loudness stakes.
Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay the band is that Ara “feel” closer to Gorguts on Obscura than, say, another modern tech band like Element. The songwriting makes no concessions to Gothenburg or Death-style melodies that invariably creep into this musical style. This is inherently abrasive music, stridently confrontational, but it grows well without resorting to the saccharine. Definitely a band to keep an eye on.
Jayaprakash Sathyamurty checks out the new album from Bovine titled ‘The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire‘, released via FDA Rekotz.
Bovine – The Sun Never Sets On The British Empire
Tracklist:
01. Barium
02. Ghost Chair
03. Thank Fuck I Aint You
04. Heroes Are What
05. The Sun Never Sets On The British Empire
06. The Battle Of The Sinkhole
07. Aneugenic
08. I Will make You Real
09. Military Wife
10. Not Another Name
The postcolonial dilemma: is this metal at all?
At first listen, Bovine might seem to sit in the neo-sludge metal camp ushered in by Baroness and Mastodon’s crossover success. Throw in some later-day stoner influence, mainly from the Josh Homme camp, and there you go. Certainly, once the brooding, minimal intro ‘Barium’ is over and ‘Ghost Chair’ bursts in, its sheer aggression and energy make for a most satisfying package. The vocals vary between a tuneful, soaring style and more tortured shouting. The guitars are massive and tight and the drums are slamming. There’s a great change in pace towards the end, and a final blast that is full of righteous intensity. It’s during ‘Thank Fuck I Ain’t You’ that I start thinking about Mastodon’s slow dilution of their own sound, Baroness’ drift from the poised artistry and heaviness of the Red Album and, well, of Muse. The soaring, modern Brit rock vocals, the bouncy bravado of the riff – it really isn’t too far away from the sound of Devon rockers.
‘Heroes Are What’ further underscores the modern rock sensibility with its clean opening, complete with those slightly anguished vocals that became a mainstay of the genre after Jeff Buckley’s success. The song then takes a swift turn into faster territory, but it’s more rocking than slamming. The riffing style itself is starting to grate on me a bit with its jaunty singlemindedness, a far cry from the intricacy of Mastodon in their prime, nevermind the acid-and-barbed-wire approach of the original wave of sludge acts from the NOLA area. The title track ups the ante a bit with a driving yet restrained build-up and more complex, probing melodies. Sure, it’s Leviathan Lite, but it’s a good song. ‘The Battle of the Sinkhole’ manages to make the most of a few transitions between moderate and fast passages, and has some great drumming. ‘I Will Make You Real’ is a standout, like the title track, heavy, layered and not without a certain subtlety. ‘Military Wife’ hints at some hardcore influences, along with a few glitchy effects. It has some very effective riffing too – much more convincingly heavy and interesting than the more alt/grunge fare that was all over the first half of the album, and the shifts in tempo really work this time. ‘Not Another Name’ is marred by the fact that the band’s more shouty vocals just don’t have that much repeat value.
Bovine is a band that has a lot of buzz about it at this point, and I can see their mix of sludge, stoner, grunge and modern rock influences finding favour in a lot of places. Perhaps it’s a measure of my own preference for the more trudging, misanthropic aspects of the sludge idiom and my lack of enthusiasm for the linear qualities of modern rock that make me somewhat less sensitive to this album’s charms. So it’s a classic YMMV deal: if you like the sound of the mix of styles I’ve alluded to, this is a superior example of its kind. If not, well, Eyehategod should have an album out any year now.
