TOMBS - Savage Gold
June 11, 2014, 10 years ago
(Relapse)
Brooklyn’s TOMBS isn’t in the business of writing easily digestible linear lines but, then again, its audience isn’t the kind of cooperative that will accept anything less. Using Williamsburg black metal à la KRALLICE as a starting point and then laying the immensity that only sludge foundations will allow for, Savage Gold is a record that screams its massive upheaval, the album a documentation of dreams shattered and ideals broken squarely down the middle, with no mediator to be found. That said, Savage Gold could have ended up sounding like the absolute plethora of albums that also contort black and doom but, instead, Tombs plays it smart and injects (literally?) thrash-based riffs that add immediacy and a sense of urgency to the jagged proceedings. Savage Gold isn’t the LP you choose to accompany your Saturday afternoon sunshine trek to the beach nor is it the morning bell that rings in each new present moment. Instead, it’s reserved for
the claustrophobic, haze-encased flashes. And it seems that’s exactly the state Tombs morbidly envisions while putting its purple-bruise riffs to tape.
