(DGR has left his usual comfort zones far behind, lured away by the Welsh band whose new EP is the subject of his review below.)
Sometimes in the process of wandering the decrepit halls and ancient ruins of metal, detector, pick-axe, and trowel in hand in the hopes of coming across something interesting that you can help spread out to a wider audience, you’ll come across something that you know isn’t directly for you, but boy howdy, do you know a whole lot of people who will absolutely be into it.
Those adventures are fun in part because you have the job now of trying to find someone on the site who may be interested in covering it or, the more likely option, you yourself get to go on an adventure of trying out something and seeing if it lands with you. Something may resonate with you, who knows?
That’s how we have landed at the doorstep of The Sorrow Of Being Immaculate, a name which floated across the proverbial – if not perpetually on fire – writer’s desk here approximately one time but somehow managed to grab attention based off of the album title alone. Because, even after fourteen-plus years of existence, how could we not be tempted to look into something entitled Church Music For Satanists?
Church Music For Satanists is pretty simple to describe, given that you could probably ballpark-guess what style of music it is based on the release label it is out on – Drone Alone Productions. Church Music For Satanists is one part auditory experiment to try and capture a mood that the group describe as being penned during “Those long nights in the dank Welsh countryside and the fear of nefarious local folklore spirits Old Magw the Witch & The Gwyllion seeped into these songs giving them an atmospheric doom.”
The second part is that this is a droning doom album, which if you’ve guessed by now, given the drunkenly tumbling nature of the opening paragraph, is way outside the ole’ DGR wheelhouse of death and grind.
Third: It’s completely instrumental. Zero vocals. None. In a way, Church Music For Satanists plays out like one very long song that then – thanks to two remixed and distorted versions of the opening songs at the end – cycles back around on itself. You now probably have an idea of what crowd around here we’re figuring this’ll reach out to.
Strangely, even when brushing – as best as one can – personal bias aside and having some sense of familiarity with the genre as a whole thanks to many a night in the Northwest watching groups claw their way through immense material, you can recognize what The Sorrow Of Being Immaculate were aiming to do with this particular EP. Given that much of the EP is built around the same repeated musical motif over and over, hovering in the background and stripped down to a bare minimum at points with little instrumentation elsewhere to be found, Church Music For Satanists becomes strangely hypnotic.
That’s the point; actual ‘church music’ with its room-filling drone and high ceilings is often the same way, so even though much of this has its roots in a ‘rented caravan’ it is still about as successful. There’s a constant hum in the background that becomes the bed upon which most of this EP lays. Church Music For Satanists has songs that run between four and six-plus minutes in length, although for the most part they’re meant to blur into one another. So much so, you likely won’t notice the forty-nine second song positioned in the fourth slot on this EP, even as it sets the scene for the final overall movement.
You’re meant to get lost in Church Music For Satanists, as songs loop into each other and shamble forward. As an attempt to capture the isolation and long nights in the countryside, the EP is weirdly succesful. There’s something haunted within the music here; it’s not just an experiment of ambling through basic chord progressions and the fun of a whole lot of effects pedals. As minimal as the instrumentation is here and the doom-pacing that the songs move at, there are times when you can envision this particular project being played out in front of you and it’s a surprisingly difficult act, being able to create an auditory experience and have the listener feel as if this project is in the same room as you.
The drone and doom fans that float in the rafters of this here site will find something fascinating within Church Music For Satanists, because it is hard to fathom something more perfectly placed in appeal for that particular crowd.
https://dronealoneprods.bandcamp.com/album/the-sorrow-of-being-immaculate-post-ritual-versions