Saturday, January 24, 2015

Sun Splitter:"Time Cathedral"




They have good drugs in Chi-town, it's often a trademark of their music. This freebases the weird. The first song is really just an intro consisting of  ambiance and noise. The first real song is a deeply unnerving dirge.  An eleven minute one that plods along in space waves until a chanted vocal comes in toward the end of the song. The go from one dreary epic sprawl to another, with more chanted vocals and the guitar creeping along. The riff are almost like funereal doom in the sense that they are very spacious and in that space is where the tension lingers .There is not that mournful dirge like quality to what they do, This is more cerebral than it is emotional.

"Star Lit " builds in tension but not aggression. It's metal and it's heavy, but not with the oppressive weight you associated with most doom, in some ways it reminds me of Megaton Leviathan in that regard. Once you are ten minutes into it you realize this chanting is where the vocals are going to remain. Trickles of sample chattering underneath the ending of the song. In the final minutes the song builds almost in a proggy Tool ish fashion.The shortest actual song is the title track that closes out the album, it takes on an almost industrial element and when we are treading the line between doom and industrial that means we are walking close to Neurosis' back yard. Rather than bringing the calm before the storm crashing down,  they  fade out into a swirling cosmos.

This must have resonated with many because the tape is sold out so now you have to go to Bandcamp to get the album. This is unique, if they had allowed themselves to be swayed by conventions and expectations of what doom or even metal for that matter should be then it would not have the same spark of originality that is the main factor propelling this album. I'll give it an 8. I appreciate what it is and enjoyed listening to it, it's one of those album where the atmosphere settles well in the background.

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