New Band To Burn One To: VIRUSES

HEAVY PLANET PRESENTS...VIRUSES!

BAND BIO:

Viruses is M. Vitali (guitars, electronics), Jeffrey Smith (bass, electronics), and Rocco DiDonna (vocals, electronics). Popdust was recorded in Chicago and New York and was released through Magnetic Eye Records (MER018).

THOUGHTS:

"Who says you need riffs and distortion to burn one, eh? I couldn't possibly be succinct in pushing the debut release from VIRUSES, an ambient-electronic three-piece stringing together nine spacey barbs on Popdust. Ethereal, entrancing, and at times deceptively dark, this is one strange, gorgeous detour splintered by arresting digital distractions.

Opening on the tense and lush Glow (Forever Fangs), we're introduced to alternating layers celebrating the organic and the synthetic while child-like distraction grows with every delightfully sporadic blip on the equally taut Earth Family Immortal. The vocal haunt evident on Lago d'Orta (Those Who Feel) channels Isaac Brock, churning and spitting with gorgeous devastation over an atmospheric drone.

Industrialized stomp and primal caution somehow marry here. There are those detectable improvisations, fueled less by mind and more by heart. But just how free is this band? Subjecting themselves to no fine-tuning and relying solely on impulse seems to work pretty well, even when smoothed-out loungescapes (Landmines) evolve into peppered blasts of pixelated shrapnel (Revanans). At the end of the day, we're walking past her house. Reflecting, regretting, and yearning.

The juxtapositions should be impossibly difficult to execute, but somehow they're not. The über-modern and the traditional, the patient and the impulsive, the dark and the hope-laden. Maybe they're not tip-toeing with streetside icy sadness; maybe they're cautiously crossing a frozen pond. Their destinations and motivations matter to them, sure. What matters to us is how captivating such questions can be."

Facebook | Buy Digital | Magnetic Eye Records | MER Soundcloud | YouTube

Sunday Sludge: Sea of Bones - "The Earth Wants Us Dead"

I can't say I didn't see it coming. Every asshole in the office managed a sneeze, a cough, and a day off work via this sinus garbage being shared. When every channel connecting my ears, nose, and throat needs the benefit of a stiff plunging, it's likely hard to imagine the bleakest of hazy sludge metal providing any measure of comfort. I'm gonna play up my assumption that the drone I've enjoyed for the last twenty-seven minutes is credited to today's Sunday Sludge rather than the ringing ears that kept me up half the night.

Halloween marks the second release from Connecticut's Sea Of Bones, an atmospheric-doom collective committed to slowly snuffing your hope on The Earth Wants Us Dead, the trio's first release since 2007's The Harvest. Six tracks cover ninety minutes, an expansive amalgam of industrial sludge metal and droning soundscapes that ensures your mood won't improve much.

Not a damn one of these six tracks is anything you can zoom through (the shortest clocks at just over seven minutes). But this isn't an album that leaves you staring at the clock. You might just shake your head at how painfully real these mists can grow. Opening on The Stone The Slave And The Architect, we're at times offered an industrialized, churning sludge that slams us from side to side within a rough concrete corridor. At a snail's pace we're drawn and quartered atop a bed of fuzz. Boiling to the surface are vocals likened to charred pleas barbed with scars, delivering prophetic finger-pointings and dragging shit-caked feet.

Much later, on The Bridge, industrial filth is again realized. Starting on unsettling panning from side to side, the track rubs its eyes, slowly rises, and slaps itself into sobriety with cold palms. There's an absolutely devastating breed of sprayed soot, a stained outlook that evolves to rattle skulls on what is now the disc's heaviest hitter. Under the weight of incessant cymbal crashes and splintered guitars, the sound somehow seems to expand and implode all at once.

Where Sea Of Bones find their bearings is within tempo shifts and breathy transitions. Black Arm moves more quickly in a steady stream of chaos, like machines losing their rivets and spitting beyond control. You'll bite your inner-cheek trying to execute these tight turns, but barren earth is just ahead on Failure Of Light and Beneath The Earth. Call it the most complete track on the album, you might initially find Failure  relatively sunny, while the slow lakeside pluck of Beneath may provide catharsis, reflection, and a half-smile. On the former, the smooth lilt of guitar marries the gentle introduction of rhythm, but slowly emerging is a pensive sludge bounce. The structure has more movement and richer tones, while the mood sternly glares upward at mounting odds. Wearing many masks, the slow-slugging beast lumbers, caking skin and leaving behind thick clouds. And Beneath finds the band at their most abrasive as we quiver under jarring licks and splashing drums. You're blinded and shuffling on all fours.

The long drone exercise of the closing title track is ominous and eerie. Reverberations move in and out, shifting between rooms with barely a hint of immediate detection. Your ears play tricks and the band is asking that you remain patient. You're frozen stiff, so you don't really have a choice. Agonizingly viscous are the heaves and swells, and you won't know what to make of the distant chatter. Close your eyes and find an escape.

You're not gonna hit play, pound your chest, and grunt "fuck yeah" with this release. You're gonna drift, drop your shoulders, and collapse under the veiled intentions. Imagine a world without color and an existence without comfort. Sea Of Bones present realizations via broad strokes and slow drags. On The Earth Wants Us Dead, they assert rather than suggest. These sludge atmospheres are bleak, sure. But someone's gotta be straight with us.

For fans of: Rwake, Primitive Man, Neurosis
Pair with: Double Mocha Porter, Rogue Ales

Facebook | Last.fm | Bandcamp | ReverbNation | Twitter

Sunday Sludge: Deuil - "Acceptance/Rebuild"

"But the trees in Stephen's Green were fragrant of rain and the rain-sodden earth gave forth its mortal odour, a faint incense rising upward through the mould from many hearts."

You're just in a state of shock. Give it a few days until the realization of total loss throws you to the floor in bawling fits. Everyone is expecting you to break down; just do your best to keep it from happening in public, mate. There are stages. This is normal. Assert all you want that it's not fair and doesn't seem real, but that can't change the fact that you've been left alone and the backbone you thought you had suddenly needs tightening.

"Deuil" translates to mourning, so perhaps the tight-lipped side-stares could've been expected. But Belgium's blackened funeral-sludge quartet offer an atmosphere of total loss and wash it down with angst and an audience of cautious observation. Acceptance/Rebuild responds to that knock on your door with slow tempos, tightly-threaded swirls of haunt, and skyward glances hoping to prevent tears from streaming south. That being said, it's gonna take a few listens before you're fully willing to start the grieving process.

Two tracks totaling twenty-seven agonizing minutes, eh? Trust us, it's pretty good. The tracks seem to execute exactly what their names suggest. Acceptance employs disembodied chants and a cloud of floating-static riffs to distract from the impending slow-sipping sludge stomp. Layers emerge and mournful sobs breed skin-scratching crackles, all under the canopy of inwardly-directed anger. Rueful violence splits at the edges and reveals a self-hate that just might block this "acceptance" from ever truly happening. Massive walls of regret swell and sweep with processional droning as backmasked memories linger and tick. The seventeen-minute opener is melodic and melancholy, completely exhausting in all its thick grief.

But if there's any hope of forward-thinking, Rebuild provides it. Consider it a white-winter gaze at what's left and what lies ahead. Hollow guitars expand with accompaniments of fuzz and slow tempos, but they find their steam and build under suspicious progressions. The guitars remain distant and guarded, but the track remains ever-confident in its promises of new life. The post-metal rhythms elevate and send us into a total warp of perception. The ultimate sludge-drone field of churning doubt where we lay our heads is, quite simply, another world.

Deuil channel their hurt in a direction that saturates and completely submerges anyone nearby. Acceptance/Rebuild isn't gonna let you stuff down the pain. The wholly-unsettling manner through which they deliver this sludge leaves little time to notice the dirt; you're focusing on the dead. When you do find a way to cope, Deuil are gonna be directly at your side. It seems they've done this before. Hell, this album could serve as a clinic on loss, mourning, and how the fuck you move on.

For fans of: Rorcal, Mournful Congregation, Lycus
Pair with: Über Sun Imperial Summer Wheat, Southern Tier Brewing Company

Bandcamp | Facebook | Big Cartel | Tumblr | Lost Pilgrims Records

Sunday Sludge: Sonance - "Like Ghosts"

You'd have a hard time finding a lighthearted American this weekend. Media saturation spills across the pond, so the melancholy is likely hovering over the rest of the world by now. I'm not sure if what we'll hear for today's Sunday Sludge is an antidote to the poison or perhaps a mere extension of the symptom, but there's no denying it's an appropriate and paralleled complement to the mood we've recently had thrust upon us.

I won't contend that a trip with Bristol's Sonance is boiled down to a handful of benzos, but the pharmaceutical effects the band imposes are staggering nonetheless. On Like Ghosts, Sonance broaden the already impossibly expansive metal continuum, utilizing ambient drone to tranquilize listeners between stunning swells and collapses. There's no mold to break, there's simply a tapestry of brilliantly woeful uncertainty, ambient with waves and punitive with walls.

Like Ghosts is like ghosts, but not in a sense of paranormal bumps and whispers. The forty-two minutes on these two tracks breathe and haunt more like an undying memory, surging and waning beyond your wishes. These ghosts are seemingly within you, not around you. You can compartmentalize the chills, but the lucidity is never sealed off. And when you've been lulled to comfort and feel a cool sigh can be enjoyed, you're jarred by descending sludge terror.

That terror is no more immediately evident than on Side A, interrupting a brief hovering swarm. Icy guitar grows poetic, mirroring Slint's tinny Spiderland jabs. Rhythms twist as much as they hammer, with jagged swirls invading every teetering emotion. Tom's vocals cling to Chino's thumbings like drying blood, while Will's tortuous accompaniment sets a landscape of agony that provides no repose. Drone drips as fears are examined with an ambient caution, but the slugs of doom greet that pensive lament. It's devastating and beautiful.

The mood takes center stage on Like Ghosts, but musicianship deserves its moment in the sun. Ben's screwdriven assault on frets is more Alex's violent droog than Thurston's sonic experiment, while the film-score precision on Side B tiptoes with early-hour cold. This is where your bones feel it, Sir. The cackles and windchimes are a sort of harbinger, but for what? Will the fog lift and let the day emerge? Perhaps. But paranoia and bleak gusts follow every sideways glance toward empty fields. Long, incredibly ambiguous, and heady as fuck. Fourteen minutes in, though, doom shakes us from our gorgeous trance and resonates with drift until chiding buoyance clubs us senseless. Sludge atmospheres funnel toward chaos, pushed abruptly and appropriately. Should we expect an end? Sometimes it just happens.

Does isolation hit us as we believe it does? The eyeless, faceless malevolence in waiting is as frightening in thought as it is in presence, so perhaps the isolation shields in any sense. With numbing resonation, these Brits pull at every fear until bones are bare. You're exposed, your fears no longer matter, and the dead air is all you need. Like Ghosts is an album that burrows and lingers long after you've put your head to the pillow. You may find yourself wishing you had the company of lost spirits. These ghosts are much harder to shake.

Site + Facebook + Bandcamp + Twitter

Sunday Sludge: The Canyon Observer - "Chapter II: These Binds Will Set You Free"

As overwhelming as Earth's size can seem, what's devastating is the distance separating countries, people, languages, and ideas. It's staggering to think there are countless corners of the world one will never see or understand. You can call music a universal language all you want, but that's not to say I'm ever gonna know what the scene is like in a place like Ljubljana, Slovenia. Pretend for a moment that you discover your new favorite band, they've blown your fucking mind with their perfect balance of style and substance, their commitment to crafting sound over pressing the flesh. But shit, now comes the realization you may never catch them live because they're not traipsing the states in a dented van and you'll have trouble even finding (or pronouncing) their hometown on a map. Well, for all the depravity the online community holds, at least there's comfort in digital downloads.

That a band as young as Ljubljana's The Canyon Observer (formed in 2011) can craft such sonic devastation on only their second release is stunning. Chapter II: These Binds Will Set You Free is a progressive and conceptual offering committed to the idea that patient acquiescence to that which is primitively and innately frightening is the only true path toward self-realization. Perhaps that's stretching things, given the Slovene tongue is hardly familiar to this ugly American. But the track titles, as adequately revealing as they are, capture the album's theme less than the patient and heavy-handed atmospheres drawn from the four distinct chapters.

Part I: As We Surrender To Lust is initially thick and choppy, spinning a buzzy stop-start dynamic that's as pleasant as it is jarring. The break employs an odd time-signature as TCO trudge toward an unnamed voice mid-chant. Guitars float on wisp and the post-metal sludge drifts to some hot, dark trenches. The most impressive emergence on the track comes in the form of layer after layer of heavy complexities. And just as elements hit the peak of density, those distant chants become judgmental, unsettling reprimands. The bouncing sludge bass line guides this excellent opener through a dark clunk you won't forget.

The slow pluck of Part II: And The Pleasure Of Pain ominously hovers and reminds post-metallers of why the patience of Isis and Neurosis hits just as hard as distortion and abrasion. A distant mist of voices circles, haunting with ambient trances. Imagine pacing a cool cavern littered with stalagmite spires alongside an eerie, yet strangely comforting, vocal companion. When you're this badly burned and blistered, that shrouded guide is all you've got.

I won't use the term accessible, but it's safe to assert Part III: We Can Descend Into The Unknown is more discernible and concrete than Parts I & II. That sounds strange, given the track's doom lean and nuanced guitar pullbacks. Progressively, vocals move from hope-laced toward an incredible wall of agonized observation. TCO become all encompassing and, amazingly, full of warmth. As listeners have drifted, so too have their reservations. A cool, tiny crack has grown into a clean and inviting ascent, mysterious as it is. And this nine-minute exposition wasn't turning down the lights without bringing back that sludgy buzz, fully balanced with sharp licks to juxtapose the thickness. This is where patience, for both artist and audience, is rewarded.

And as the title would suggest, Part IV: And Drift Away is a slow course through sterile, icy progressions. The swirling tin elements are deceptively cathartic; there's a calm within these bursts of chaos before the ultimate doom-metal implosion/ejection. The massive, crushing malevolence is, in its most extreme form, also a sort of acceptance. Everything this album has thus far built and offered is being unrelentingly dismantled, and this crusty death-blow is a numbingly profound coup de grâce.

As you've likely noted, Chapter II strings together its track titles to form "As we surrender to lust and the pleasure of pain, we can descend into the unknown and drift away." That's a bold statement, and an even bolder concept. But the sounds actually stick to the idea even better than the titles. The Canyon Observer will draw you in and chip away at everything familiar. When you're struck by their ability to effectively change the course of your thoughts, you begin to fully sense that they're in control. You've been set out to sea and left with little more than blind faith. But hey... when that's all you've got, you'd better hold tight.

Band:

Gašper Letonja
Miloš Milošević
Matic Babič
Sašo Paljk
Nik Franko

Bandcamp | Facebook | Site | Kapa Records