Doom! And gloom! This is both a weather forecast for the next few weeks and the forecast for this very post. You know the drill - the riffs are slow, the feedback can only be described as "a lot" and the smoke fills the room. It's Doomsday baby!
Beast Eagle - Sorceress
I’ve been asking this question for so long, and have written about it so many times on the blog, that at this point I am more using the page as a place to have a conversation with myself and figure out the answer than anything else. The question being, why do some “straight up” bands fall short while others absolutely kick ass? That is, if the genre being performed is played completely straight, with all or most tropes in tact, what makes the difference between an album that I have absolutely no interest in and one that I absolutely can’t put down? In the past, my answer was “passion” but that’s such an ephemeral category as to be almost completely useless. Put another way, it offers no predictive power or explanatory capacity. That is, it doesn’t help me discern ahead of time which album will be good and which won’t; I have to simply spin the albums a few times and find out.
Though maybe that’s the “best” we can hope for when we’re talking about music. Or, to rephrase, maybe we don’t want anything better. After all, the transient and inexplicable nature of music and our immediate connection with it is the whole point, right? There is no power on earth that can replace that feeling of lightning running through your bones the first time you hear an album you love. This is especially true if that album harkens to something “simple”, to a core essence of a beloved genre. Then, there is a sort of merging of past and present and the outpouring of affection you feel for the release elevates it from just executing a formula to participating in age long traditions such as “heavy fucking metal”. It’s a unique feeling and one which I probably wouldn’t even want to categorize and explain as it would take away a lot of that time-tripping magic, since the fuel which generates that sensation has a lot to do with surprise.
Anyway, Beast Eagle’s Sorceress is some truly bitching, kick-ass, heavy metal laden doom metal. It has the riffs which rock and, more important, it has that quality that cannot be pinned down which takes it from “just” another kick-ass doom album and elevates it into “heavy fucking metal” territory. Give it a spin. Or, rather give a spin to the one track that’s out there; it’s probably the best one on the album and the full thing releases in November. Sue me.
-EK
Gigafauna - Drowning Light
Man, I am just a sucker for some “spidery”, twisting, and whirling doom metal that flirts with the progressive but still stays very much grounded in the Art of the Riff. Think HARK (RIP). Think early Mastodon (RIP). Think Gigafauna (very much alive). Hailing from Sweden, these groove mongers have some of my favorite stuff around: bright, shimmering vocals backed by deep harsh vocals, unwinding, groovy riffs, and sick-ass sci-fi art for their cover art. If the ingredients seem familiar, they are not conjoined in quite the same way you might expect; there’s something surprisingly bright in here, exemplified in the aforementioned clean, and very much primary, vocals. It’s music to my ears as it brings everything together into a scintillating sort of timbre that you might know I just adore (if you’ve been following the million times I’ve said as much on the blog).
If Calyces caught your ear earlier this year (as well it should), then give this one a listen. It’s more “spiraly” than that release (I’m pretty sure my English teacher would have executed me on the spot at this point but hey, she didn’t have to describe something as indescribable as music), more out there and complex. But, to their credit, Gigafauna never let that stop their momentum and heft, creating a tantalizingly heavy and complex album in Drowning Light.
-EK
Thumos - The Trial of Socrates
Though I might’ve taken a handful of philosophy and humanities courses back in my day, I’m about as well-versed in Greek philosophers as Bill and Ted. Fortunately, that doesn’t matter much when it comes to Thumos’ latest album—it’s an instrumental album absent of all the debates and dissertations that one might expect from an album of this nature. Of course, more scholarly listeners may find extra layers to chew on, but at nearly two hours long, whether you need more is another question entirely. The Trial of Socrates offers a pretty ridiculous bounty of progressive doom, glossed with enough prog and post-rock affectations that Thumos could make a compelling case to write a soundtrack. Uncoincidentally, tracks like “The Protagoras” brim with an energy reminiscent of a cheerier Explosions in the Sky, balancing against the Godflesh-by-way-of-If These Trees Could Talk weight of “The Gorgias,” the blackened, riffy slugfest of “The Meno,” the prog-sludge churn of “The Philebus,” and the gnarled and shifty “The Theaetetus.” If not for their stellar 2022 release The Republic, I’d have scoffed at the idea of how something this sprawling could hang together so cohesively without lapsing into redundancy, but Thumos manage to find the sweet spot, blending and bouncing between genres seamlessly.
Given the length of The Trial of Socrates, sequencing becomes a big part of the experience. Taken as a whole, the album is surprisingly engaging—each track carves out its own identity, and no consecutive cuts hit the same beats. Even without vocals, the band keeps things varied. There's a solid 40-minute stretch before the electronic textures from “The Protagoras” resurface in “The Sophist.” Is that a theme or motif? Hell if I know, but I appreciate their care in keeping their sonic palette fresh as they (maybe too nerdily for my ears) do some storytelling. By the same token, the record also works great in smaller doses. Unless you’re couch-locked or settling in for a road trip, it’s just as rewarding to pick up where you left off and take it chapter by chapter, and I begrudgingly say this as an “albums, not songs” listener. If you’re looking for something that covers a lot of bases and won’t scare off your grandma, get your mitts on this and put some time in with one of the year’s most ambitious and impressive efforts.
-Jordan Jerabek