Having worked hard at creating meaty and reverbed sludge metal perfection on stages across the south of England and beyond, London’s Morag Tong entered the studio to lay down a few tracks at the tail end of 2015. The resultant EP, ‘Through Clouded Time’, released at the beginning of the new year, presents four numbers of sheer weightiness that not only act as a great snapshot of Morag Tong’s purer musical intents, but also instantly asserts itself as an underground sludge classic.
Tag Archives: doom
BLACK OATH – Litanies In The Dark EP
With three full lengths and a handful of EP’s behind them, Italy’s Black Oath have built a cult following since the late noughties, been featured on a Black Sabbath tribute disc and released an underground classic in 2015’s ‘To Below and Beyond’, an album which definitely pushed the band farther up the league table. A hard act to follow, 2016’s ‘Litanies In The Dark’ EP acts as a mere distraction, plugging a gap by featuring four leftovers recorded between 2012-2015. A couple of these tracks are worthy of adding to the Oath canon, others not: as is often the way with leftovers, they are sometimes left over for a reason.
HERIOT – World Collapse EP
Since some bands can forge decade long careers without even attracting a sniff of attention from mainstream press, the fact that Heriot gained positive press from Kerrang! magazine within a year of formation, meant that their future career looked very bright indeed. Judging by the Swindon based band’s second EP, the appropriately titled ‘World Collapse’, it’s fairly easy to see why they’d become press worthy at such an important time in their growth as a band: they play bigger riffs than most and their musical style absolutely crushes.
KUROKUMA – Advorsus EP
There have been a vast number of bands and musicians to come out of Sheffield over the years: Arctic Monkeys, Joe Cocker, Human League, Pulp, Def Leppard and ABC are arguably the most successful, but doom metal trio Kurokuma are almost without doubt the heaviest. These guys don’t just mean business – they’re coming to smash you into oblivion with an intensity that is truly impressive.
A THOUSAND SUFFERINGS – Burden
Belgian sludge/doom combo A Thousand Sufferings could never be accused to doing things half-heartedly. Sludge has always taken the nuts and bolts of Black Sabbath and slowed it and heavied it’s very essence to it’s logical extreme. A Thousand Sufferings, at first, seem to go one better, as even ‘Once In A Blue Moon’, a spoken intro, appears to adopt the sludge/doom ethos, as the band take what would have been a brief sample from TV drama ‘The Americans’, but play it back at half speed. The effect of hearing synth music, the sounds of helicopters and human voices played back at a much slower speed can be unsettling. The fact that one of the characters is halfway through a monologue regarding the chain of nature and mortality makes it all the more disquieting. It makes for a very slow and potentially quite grim three minutes. With this intro, the band builds tension in a really obtuse manner and the three proper tracks which follow – sprawling across over half an hour – are just as oppressive.