(Grant Skelton reviews the debut album by the Dutch doom band Treurwilg. and brings us a premiere stream of all the songs.)
Earlier this year, I stumbled across Treurwilg on Bandcamp. In January, they released an album of tracks recorded live at the Little Devil bar in their hometown of Tilburg. The album art intrigued me, so I gave it a listen. Since then, I’ve been chomping at the proverbial bit for a proper studio album. So when Treurwilg unveiled the track “As His Final Light Is Fading” from Departure, their debut release, my expectations were exceeded. Readers may remember that I featured the track in a previous Seen & Heard. There, I described it thusly:
“The track is heavy and slow. Heavy like a stony albatross about your neck. And slow like the way you’d die from drowning. It’s also ambivalent, fluctuating between violence and melancholy. The last minute is absolute savagery that flays the flesh of the inner ear. And I mean all that in the best way possible.”