Heavy Bloggers rejoice, your first taste of new music today comes in the form of genre-melding, skin melting proto-sludge metal that hits hard, riffs hard, and basks in the doom and gloom of life. From one of the minds behind Heavy favourites Fawn Limbs and Infinite Nomad, Mireplaner‘s debut LP A Mountain Of Saola Hooves sits tentatively under the “sludge” umbrella, bringing with it the chaos of dissonant hardcore and the no-quarter-given impact of crushing post-metal. Start your day right, folks.
With a recording as ambitious as the artwork is beautiful, Mireplaner have pulled off a stunner with A Mountain of Saolo Hooves. Colossal waves of decadent and dissonant post-metal crash off shores jagged with an atmospheric underscore of noise and synth, the metaphor completed by rare, smogged over stabs of hope from a lighthouse and it’s beam. Impeccable imagery aside, this debut record is as enjoyable in it’s most pulverizing moments as it is through the moments of “reprieve”. Quotation marks applied here because how much reprieve can you squeeze in when there’s always still a sense of imminent dread hanging about?
“The Elkhorn Coral” and “Knees Cicatrised” provide the album’s most immediate displays of sludgy post-metal, but this post-metal doesn’t fall back on laborious sludge riffs, the relentless performances see to that. There’s no shortage of chunky, staccato flourishes of military-precise ‘core – my affinity for War From A Harlots Mouth drawing me in even deeper with these particular barrages of sound. But even in their more primal performances, Mireplaner intertwine the direct assault with shifting, sliding noise and electronic elements. LLNN do something akin to this that I dig, but the Finns behind “Morass” and “Light Departure” take post-apocalypticore to a different dimension.
The longer forms of these two tracks shift unreal amounts of energy, pulling back and forth and dipping in and out of space-rock and gravel’n’guts sludge. Mireplaner’s “heavy” bits are heavier because they’re always in the corner of the room, ready to burst out. It’s tiring, in the nicest possible way. At the three quarter hour mark when the raw closer “Saturation of the Bleeding Maw” bleeds into some fucking creepy bells (or something), you’ll have felt every second of A Mountain of Saolo Hooves in, and/or, under your skin. It’s desolate and beautiful at the same time, like an empty calendar. The next time someone tells you “post” anything ain’t that, point them to Mireplaner. And Conjurer, but Mireplaner first.
The fella behind the strings, noise and voice of Mireplaner (don’t forget Fawn Limbs, Infinite Nomad, and Lung Knots – busy bee!) Eeli Helin was kind enough to spill some beans on the record, so we’ll leave you with him and social media links etc below –
“After a years worth of constantly interrupted, exhausting and manic work, we’re extremely pleased to finally release “A Mountain of Saola Hooves” and premiere it today with Heavy Blog Is Heavy. Without further gimmicks, this album is meant to beat you up and drag you through the schorched and dead remnants of todays colonies, until thrusting your lifeless body headfirst into the thickest and the most sickening sludge this Earth bears upon itself, and leave you there. Light is very sparse, hope is very infrequent.”
A Mountain of Saolo Hooves is out Friday 3rd, so enjoy the chaos and claustrophobia for a few days and then grab it here. Get Mireplaner here.