This isn’t DGR‘s annual year-end list. That might yet come. This is the third Part of his four-Part collection of reviews that we started rolling out yesterday, focusing on 2023 albums we hadn’t managed to review before. You’ll find his full explanation for what he’s doing here at the beginning of Part I.
Snakemother – Snakemother
As far as I can recall, I wrote exactly one article about doom groups this year for the site and it happened near the beginning of the year. I forget how exactly I came across the Bay Area’s Snakemother but I’ve had them in the review queue for ages, mostly consisting of me asking other people around the site “Hey, have you heard of this? This seems like this is going to be huge.”
The long and well….slightly less long of it is that Snakemother are a fuzzed-out as hell doom group with prog ambitions, mostly clean-sung, backed by continent-rattling rumble, and with absolutely no care about getting right to the point, instead morphing everything into a dreamlike journey along the way.
Credit to the crew comprising Snakemother though, they’re all experts at this style and terrifyingly adept at it as well. You’d never guess this was the first release from a project like this because it’s very single-minded in its dedication to atmosphere and style – as a result you get a pleasantly gorgeous and lush audio experience as Snakemother wander from place to place, summoning up occult imagery and folk melody in equal measure.
It’s not often you have a doom album where you could actually hum some of the main guitar parts to yourself – even acquesing on the point that you’re probably going faster than the band are from note to note – but Snakemother‘s debut has enough riff work in it to keep you from lulling off during the thirty-five-ish minutes.
I imagine a lot of people are going to lock in with album opener and longest song “Ritual”. It makes sense; that’s a song that is so well-designed to get its hooks in you it would otherwise be criminal. “Ritual” lays bare a lot of the Snakemother formula from the start, and likewise those ideas are then expanded upon in a variety of different approaches throughout the album. If the opening song is the mission statement and overarching story description, then every song following is a different approach and idea plucked from it.
That’s why the following song “Sacrum” hits so fucking hard in its opening bit. You think you’ve got the hang of it with “Ritual” and then it takes a bunch of those ideas and just makes them leagues heavier. There’s still a clean break within the song but “Sacrum” is absolutely drenched in reverb and distortion. Snakemother drift from calm to heavy multiple times over the course of their debut and those heftier segments are the ones where the slower tempos settle in.
At first glance you’d never guess by just song length alone what style of band they were but it’s only after you spend that thirty-five minutes awash in the rumble this group produces that you can hear where they’ve earned their genre tags. Snakemother serve as an excellent and pleasant break from the constant death metal hammering we have going on throughout this here multi-part article.
Even if it took us six months after the album’s release to get to the point where we could – and absolutely do – recommend it.
https://snakemother.bandcamp.com/album/snakemother
https://www.facebook.com/Snakemothermusic
Absolutism – Asynchronus
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A band from Spain combines grind, death metal, tech-death, bathes it all in a wash of dissonance, and couches it in Sci-fi atmospherics and then unleashes it upon the world. That’s right, we’re talking about Absolutism and their newest release Asychronus, unleashed upon the world in mid-November and spinning fast enough in both tempo and technicality to trigger a false positive for any astronomers currently star hunting.
Asychronus is an absolutely head-spinning release and Absolutism make it pretty clear they have no intention to tone it down from the first few moments. Ten songs absolutely packed to the gills with riffs and with song titles complicated enough – though not as heavy on the portmanteu as Distaste like to get – to make anyone thank the dark lord for the ability to copy and paste — that’s what you get in Asynchronus‘ near forty-minute first full-length.
If you think we’re joking about things being head-spinners here, try to keep track of how many times the band absolutely murder the start/stomp tempo dynamic within the opening two songs, “Lost Wavelengths” and “Ophivchvs Fortress”. It’s only two songs but there’s enough there in those two that you’d be forgiven for putting your hands up and declaring that you’re done and satisfied by the time those close out – though you’d be missing out on a hell of an adrenaline rush in “Lothophagovs” following afterward.
It’s not hard to have one’s curiosity piqued as to whether or not Absolutism can keep the madness going throughout Asynchronus, yet for the most part they absolutely do, and if anything get even more demented on the speed-front throughout. They develop a clear sense for velocity worship and try to keep it in equal standing with the sense of brutality that underlies the whole release.
Later on in the album the band even see just how far they can throw listeners and pry on their musical boundaries in the seven minutes of “Ayschronvs Sentience”. If you hadn’t been overwhelmed by the collapsing wall of sound that Absolutism deliver over the course of the album up to that point, then that song is going to be one hell of a trial to put yourself through. The song is absolutely immense and basically slams as much of the album’s overarching themes into one track as Absolutism can manage. It almost makes the sci-fi weirdness of near-interstitial break “Uppständelse” at the midpoint of Asychronus feel like it never happened.
Though to be fair it’s not like the band haven’t already immolated the memories of that as they’re on-fire cartwheelng their way through “The Hidden Svns”/”The Eleventh Parsec” pairing beforehand.
Ayschronus is an album meant to strap the listener onto a rocket and fire them into space, and in that sense Absolutism absolutely succeed. The album is blinding and a classic white-knuckle adrenaline rush. The constant maelstrom the band spin alone could be easily worth a recommendation; the death metal riff-avalanche that the album becomes as well pretty much seals that fact.
https://absolutism.bandcamp.com/album/asynchronous
https://www.facebook.com/Absolutism-104370278266826
Devils Reef – The Droste Observer
We have touched base with the Frederick, Maryland tech-death group Devils Reef before. Way back in 2021, checking in with their October-released EP A Whisper From The Cosmos at that time. The band have returned two years later with a ten minutes longer full-length in the form of The Droste Observer and it is very interesting to see how Devils Reef have decided to expand upon their art.
The group have a thrashier bent than you might expect, at the time of Whisper From The Cosmos placing them in the same sandbox that groups like Revocation are prone to playing in, and Devils Reef expand upon a lot of those ideas mightily with The Droste Observer. They’ve taken all of the building blocks they were working with back then and refined upon them for their full-length, placing a bigger emphasison the ‘death’-ier side of things while maintaining the constant uptempo that could whip a crowd into a frenzy with ease.
Devils Reef show off a surprising array of musical ideas throughout The Droste Observer, bending, mutating, and breaking a few along the way to make them fit into the Devils Reef mold. If nothing else it makes for an impressive thirty-six minutes of musical sandblasting.
There’s a case to be made that the two “Paradigm” songs on The Droste Observer – “Betrayal” and “Clarity” – that lie at the midpoint and the end of the album respectively, are worth the trip alone. “Betrayal” is the weightier of the two but also combines a lot of the already swirling mass of ideas throughout the earlier parts of The Droste Observer into one cohesive ‘whole’. It’s an intricate track with multiple veins of inspiration running throughout it, the strange and oddly-pointed opening rhythm segments to the tradional circle pit that gets spun up throughout; Devils Reef ram as much as they can into that song and it swings its tendrils around into a variety of spots. At times it can seem like it has been furiously bolted together but “Betrayal” can hold a lot of interest simply due to a desire to see just where Devils Reef take things next.
“Clarity” at the end of the album is shorter and much more of a bruiser by comparison. Devils Reef get seismic on their closing song and it’s much easier to understand in format; an interesting choice to close the album out with a gigantic ass-kicker like how “Clarity” starts out and apocalyptically ends on.
Other highlights include the shorter shirt-tearer of “Turbulent Reality”, which is a song that has Devils Reef well within their comfort zone – albeit at its shiniest so far – and the titular “Droste Observer” track earlier on. “The Droste Observer” as a song is one of those that is written to never let up once, so you’re very well aware up until the echoing solo work that this is going to be one of those tracks where you wind up with your hair on fire by the end. Devils Reef definitely work to keep that tech-death tag in play throughout.
Much like their Whisper From The Cosmos EP beforehand, The Droste Observer has Devils Reef capable of knocking down cities like an unexpected windstorm. This is one for those who like their tech-death pit-riff worthy and as angular and sharp as a sea urchin. Devils Reef are sci-fi nanite-blade precise and not afraid to show how much they can cut with this one.
https://devilsreef.bandcamp.com/album/the-droste-observer
https://www.facebook.com/DevilsReefOfficial