Rating: 10.0
Country: UK
Genre: Sludge Doom
Record Label: Self Released
Release Date: 2007
Track list:
1. The Bleak Volcano
2. Speweth Forth Magmatic Annihilation
3. And Thus Cometh the Slow Destrucctaur
4. Bring Forth the Blackened Twilight
Total playing time 39:52
Band Website: Arachnotaur
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Arachnotaur - Slo=w Pertinacious Threnody On the Abnegation of Succour
Rav Bone - Guitar, Screeched Vocals
Air Attack - Guitar, Whispered Vocals
Duxty Dekazvez - Drums, Guttural Vocals
Captain Dog - Bass
Back a few years ago when Southern Lord was still primarily a doom label, many of their CDs that I bought had small stickers on the covers that advertised the musical content inside. While usually hyperbolic to the extreme (befitting the extreme doom inside, I guess), because of those stickers I bought many albums I might have otherwise passed over. Warhorse was “Crushing Apocalyptic Doom Metal!!!” Khanate was “Hellish Brooding Doom with Tortured Vokills!” Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine was “Unholy Invocation of Crippling Doom!!!” Arachnotaur was “Paranoia-inducing Hynoptic Sludge Doom!!!”
Okay, so I made that last one up: Arachnotaur was not on Southern Lord. They aren't on any label, a fact almost as confusing as their music is heavy, and that's saying a lot because their debut album Slo=w Pertinacious Threnody On the Abnegation of Succour (which turns out to be one of the most fitting albums titles I've heard in a long, long time) is stupendously and ridiculously heavy.
If claustrophobia had a sound it would probably be Arachnotaur, specifically the last two minutes of “The Bleak Volcano” as it segues into the avalanche of “Speweth Forth Magmatic Annihilation,” a lurching, grinding down strummed monstrosity: with every throb and pulse the walls (that Khanate built and Buried At Sea strengthened and Whitehorse reinforced) moving closer, closer to crushing me as I cower terrified in the corner. Isis could have done something like this if they'd taken the Mosquito Control EP and gone in a different direction for Celestial: if they had added evil paranoid spirits and howling schizophrenic ghosts, consorted with true madmen locked in otherworldly battles with enemies never seen nor heard, and put all that to tape. Only Arachnotaur has done that, has put to music, given sound and life to, an army of doomed monstrosities marching lockstep from the Earth's cold center, crawling dead and frozen from Dante's iced-over ninth level, slithering in terrible surreality from every child's worst nightmare. The malevolent laughing in “Bring Forth the Blackened Twilight” is a psychosis more frightening in four seconds than Alan Dubin ever achieved in three albums.
Charles Moraze wrote about “collective incubation” as regards a civilization's development: in Ellul's words, “This incubation… was the preparation for the moment of formulation, of expression.” In sludge doom SPTOtAoS is that moment of expression. A thousand down-tuned, feedbacked, creeping black moments coiled into one ugly destructive seething mass, the histories of doom and sludge congealing into forty minutes of frightening, disgusting heaviness.. The guitars of Rav Bone and Air Attack summon the same demons Black Sabbath first conjured on "Black Sabbath", demons that through the years have done the bidding of Electric Wizard, Burning Witch, Toadliquor and so many others. And finally after almost forty years, now in the service of Arachnotaur, those demons are here at last to herald our destruction. The rhythm section of drummer Duxty Dekazvez and bassist Captain Dog batters and pounds and pulses away, playing from the hymnal written by Saint Vitus, Cavity, Grief, Disembowelment, turning those stately, if ignoble, hymns into grim death marches that might be merely heavy doom metal songs if it weren't for their undulating depth and overwhelming forward thrust: this is sludge that attacks with ferocious power and might.
And where does that leave us, the beaten and bruised listener? Surrounded by the dread miasma Eyehategod invoked on Take As Needed For Pain: weighed inexorably down by the suffocating negative space that Buried At Sea created with Migration: buried under the tectonic mine tailings of Uncertainty Principle's Grand Unification Energy. Praying to the Slow Destrucctaur for our lives to be spared, that long we have looked into the abyss and now understand… Even though this might be the culmination of forty years of doomed (guitar) distortion, I hesitate to call this a logical conclusion to any thread of doom metal: one, because logic has no place in Arachnotaur's world: and two, because no Fate could imagine an end so mercilessly cruel. The Slow Destrucctaur has come to Earth, at last! and fear and terror are the only reasonable reactions to such a great and noisy beast.
SPTOtAoS is an album I can listen to on repeat for days. No matter how many times I hear it, listen to it, absorb it, it never gets old and something new appears each time. The ignominious words of Charles Manson are somewhat perfectly appropriate to this album: “…everyday, every reality is a new reality. Every new reality is a new horizon.” That Arachnotaur is unsigned is inexplicable: these crazy (in the best way possible) fuckers are rewriting the sludge doom bible. So, I say to you, “Come, my fanatics!” Be brought low to peer into the abyss with me and see if you don't likewise find the devastating and wondrous beauty therein; because this is a perfect album and very possibly the best sludge doom album I have ever heard.
June 30, 2009 |
