SOOTHSAYER - At This Great Depth
December 28, 2016, 7 years ago
(Transcending Obscurity)
No, not THAT Soothsayer, this one being a sludge/doom band from Ireland who are calling this two-song release their first full-length, even though the EP it's following up was longer, but who's really keeping track of that kinda thing? When the songs are 16 minutes and 8 minutes long, and when they contain as much depth as these two songs do, it's hard to call this anything but an album.
Opener “Umpire” (really the least sludge/doom song title I've come across in a while) does a wonderful job at creating atmosphere out of hardly anything at all, the riff barely existing, the drums carrying things along, vocals not showing up until around 6:40 or so... It's awesome, man, the band totally working within the parameters of this sort of epic, atmospheric sludge (funeral sludge?) but also crafting something worthy here, something powerful and memorable. The second song, “Of Locusts And Moths,” starts off sounding a whole lot like the first song, which creates the feeling of this whole album just being one huge monolith that slowly steamrolls you (with the occasional surprising blast part, too) until it finally, mercifully, ends, but not before the band drops a downright catchy riff to wake you up at the three-quarters mark of “Of Locusts And Moths”. Excellent stuff.
