(After a bit of a lull DGR returns to NCS with a review of a great discovery, the second EP by the Swedish one-person band Soul Tomb.)
After years of doing whatver you might refer to this as, you sort of develop a sense that the year in heavy metal has a flow to it. There are plenty of peaks and valleys and often Summer can feel like a massive deluge of releases as hardcore festival and touring season gets underway, but there is one thing that has proven to be as equally reliable as the end of the year clusterfuck season or the time set aside for the brave souls who defy the odds and attempt a December release: January is a weird month.
January comes to us at the end of a whole year’s closing, partially feeling like the recovery from a hangover rather than the opportunity to appraise things anew and appreciate the potential of upcoming opportunities. The month is not bereft of releases; in fact the reason why January tends to consistently feel strange is the opposite.
There are a ton of releases in January, but truth be told you never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes it’s by big, recognizable names but more often January gets to be a month of gambles and discoveries – which is how the year started on this end.
There’s just enough spotlight being cleared during the January release window that there’s time to come across many new bands and projects, just as often the realm of a full-blown group as it is the solo musical warrior armed with decent computer and speakers. Sometimes throwing on the ole’ flashlit hardhat and pretending to be the world’s most niche cultural anthropologist is enough to carry you through a month’s listenings. But just as important can be the times when you want to acknowledge those who are brave enough to put themselves out there and take a swing at letting their music speak for itself.
Which is how we wound up at the doorstep of the solo doom project Soul Tomb and its newest release Drowning.
Doom is as multifaceted and widespread a genre as can get for something that seems so simple from a foundational standpoint, and as such it offers many pathways for someone to wander down. Groups often specialize in one particular type over another such that outside of the required slow tempo, there will be so much different around the edges of the doom core that you could feasibly dodge large blocks of a style and not even notice.
This offers a buffet of influences and styles to choose from for a musician seeking to stake their claim within the hallowed halls of the overwhelming and slow. In the case of Soul Tomb, this project seems perfectly content to pick and choose from all of them to create its own sampler platter of miasma to work from.
Drowning is recognizably a doom record but it doesn’t adhere to being an archive of the frozen wastes or a trek through the murk. The six songs on offer instead vacillate across three seperate wavelengths so you get a ‘best of’ taste of each, with songs that have rolling grooves like the crashing of the waves and songs that do manage to evoke the crystalline and frozen lakes of melodramatic Euro-doom. There’s even a proper dirge in the mix on Drowning, though surprisingly enough the whole release keeps things under four minutes a song.
Project lead Benjamin Håkansson has a gloriously hefty growl and uses it to full effect throughout his latest Soul Tomb effort. As mentioned before, he keeps things tight in terms of run time on this release, and even though not a single song sails past the four-minute mark (some edge close at about three-fifty-odd) they still nail enough of the genre’s hallmarks that it feels like all that needs to be said has been uttered by the time “This Too Shall Pass” closes out the whole event.
The titular “Drowning” wastes no time in setting impressions; its opening guitar-crash feels absolutely apocalyptic, and as a result each punctuated drum-hit slams into the recording like a truck ramming into the side of a building. The few seconds of peace within “Drowning” serve to allow the song to wrap back around on itself. It’s not really a moment of respite when you know another mountain is going to be dropped on you with the coming of another verse.
On the other hand, “Endlessly” is more in line with the reverb-filled sludge that has long become paramount to the style out here in the States. It pulls just as much from the ’70s and ’80s beginnings and expands out into occult heavy structures and hazier atmospherics. There was always going to be someone who looked at the beginnings of a style and said ‘but what if we went slower or were uglier’. In a way, you’re more likely to drown in the sound of this release on “Endlessly” than you are the title song, but that’s due to its heavy stoner doom and sludge overtones. A man may sound like he’s on the brink of madness lyrically, but musically? That’s a comfortable torrent of sound upon which to rest your head. “A Warning”, two songs later in the run, does this to similar effect as well but with an absolutely jarring introductory bit in case you were somehow lulled into a false sense of security during “Sick”.
What is recognizable about Drowning is just how expertly crafted a release it is. It’s clear Soul Tomb has a deep regard for many of the doom genre’s blueprints and standards, and though this release is appropriate draped in misery, seems to be gleefully pulling from every bucket it comes across like a kid in a candy store. The only guarantee with Drowning is that it is single-minded in being a doom release, but doesn’t want to be a particularly one-dimensional take on the genre as a whole. It becomes a far more dynamic release than expected in that sense, where you might’ve initially been prepping yourself to be dragged by tied wrists behind an ox-cart for forty-plus minutes in a single song but instead get six songs that, for a slow as they are, are relatively surgical in dropping a cruise-ship’s worth of musical weight on your house.
Drowning is impressive as a solo venture from Soul Tomb and it would be hard to imagine people with a taste for the genre walking away from this one without finding something to enjoy here. There’s just too much good stuff on offer.