November is Doom - Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean : "Sisyphean Cruelty"

 

Not our first dance with these guys. We love the fact they are so insanely heavy. This is demonstrated again on their new album it feels like it is hitting for a more sludge direction on the first song.  The croak of the more death-drenched vocals works really well. Things pick up to a more grooving pound for "Unfit For Human Life". The vocals are spewed with convincing anger. "Solitude Illusion" either finds itself droning on a repetitive riff or blasting with the vocals in a feral scream. Not the album's strongest moment. But they set the bar pretty high for themselves on the first two songs. To their credit the bulk of the songs are compactly arranged and only the last song ventures over the six-minute mark. 

"Deconstruction of the Great Immovable" is darker and slower, allowing the guitar to ring out with more of an eerie throb, though the vocals are less purposeful and scream out from pain with little thought to what they are adding to the flow of the song. The riff shifts into a more determined stomp, as it chugs forward. Midway into the song you begin to speculate how much further are they going to drag this, and the answer is slower. They use feedback to make this more abrasive. You have to go into this making sure you are in the mood to have your ears hammered. "Crawl off and Die" finds Tremolo picking at the wheel when the song opens. Then it drops down into a dragged-out riff, that alternates in the blackness it buzzes with. I can appreciate how nasty the overall mood is here. 

"Barely Any Reason to Be Alive" is more despairing in the doomy mood it rumbles toward you with. It locks into a steady syncopation and grooves a little more. The bad vibes they are trying to spread are past the point of head-banging and taking what Eyehategod once did in an even more extreme direction. The title track is more uptempo and carries a more death metal-like menace to the riff driving it. It is one of the album's strongest tracks. The last song drags a little more and the vocals are going berserk rather than trying to guide the song.  I will however give this album 8.5, as it is effective at being mind-numbingly heavy with it's raw in-your-face feedback-laden production. 

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