With the three ~6-minute tracks of this EP, the Serbian group of
Нула
unroll some sludgy doom metal, with slick melody shifts being the most
distinguishing feature. The instrumental work is decent, with clear-cut
guitar lines coming together neatly with the bass underpinnings and
percussive counter-point, and while there’s not much to set them apart
from the masses of rough heavy metal (apart from a stretch of
atmospheric focus in closing track “Usnuo – Savrsen – Sam”), they bring a
respectable earnestness to the howls and yells.
On their debut EP, the four-piece Turkish band of
Sülfür Ensemble
roll out a set of heavy sludge, delivering on the EP’s title with, in order, “Daily Hate”, “Plea”, “Karaçor“, and “Marilyn”. Some choice film audio samples complement the fuzzy guitar, slabby bass, punchy drums, and rasping vocals, and while the band doesn’t do anything groundbreaking with the style, they do pull off a solid set for their first release, with enough flair put into the guitar touches to suggest the potential for cool embellishment in live performances.
On their third album, the Ukrainian duo of Celophys continue to experiment with the pre-human settings of their doom/sludge metal, with thickly-reverbed guitar, dirge-paced drums, and growling baritone vocals as the only instrumentation besides a handful of vocal samples. Following big, chunky riffs through slow melody cycles, with occasional jags of sharp feedback, and sometimes giving the blues roots some extra clarity (as in the second song, “Spaceburger”), the tracks don’t show much variation in the music, but that kind of fits with the elephantine shaping of the songs, and the riffs are generally strong enough to carry things through the sluggishness anyway.
On their second EP (not counting the original demo), the Australian group of She Beast share four tracks of dirty doom sludge, gurgling growls and down-tuned guitars colliding with hard-pounded drums and a thick bass slather. Jumps to quick tempos are mostly kept to the shorter songs, and the EP follows an alternating pattern of a ~3-minute track followed by one about seven minutes long, making for a neat split of sides if this had ever received physical release. The longer songs maintain a heavy grinding pace, so the avoidance of getting stuck on one vibe for too long by switching back and forth helps quite a bit. Solid stuff in fast or slow mode, with a genuinely grimy feel to the sound and some surprisingly hooky riffs.
On their first full album, released six years after their debut EP, Norska pack in six tracks of heavy sludge, with doomy textures knitted into the bridges and sub-melodies. Despite the harshness of the vocals and lead guitar spurts, there’s a disarming undercurrent of melancholy, mainly due to the communicative handling of the bass, which leads to some interesting back-and-forth between the two main styles. The instruments do an impressive job of tumbling between outpoured anger and withdrawn brooding, and while the vocals lend a clear human element to the emoting, they come off much better when they’re limited to embellishment or reinforcement of the music.
When the vocals take the lead, which is usually during the more sludgy portions, it ends up feeling like the band is sacrificing nuance, with the howls overshadowing the tone-work while the drums get muddied in the mix. There’s some strong moments to the music, but the move away from their mostly-instrumental song-writing on the self-titled EP toward more standard vocal allotment doesn’t feel like a fair trade. Instead, it seems to hamper the songs, and for a majority of the music, it feels as though the singing could have been carved out without drastically affecting the impact of the playing. That the band is working hard to keep themselves out of stagnant reliance on successful past approaches is appreciable, but for an album so long in the making, it’s surprising that they were satisfied enough with this point of the refinement to release it as a full LP.
Scrambled Brains 