When did anything slow, dark, and covered in reverb become "doom"? Perhaps it is the fault of those Sunn O))) kids, but in my day we called this dark ambient, and we wore onions on our belts and walked to school up hill, both ways. This "doom" album definitely has the darkness and bleak sounds that characterize the genre (and dark ambient as well), and being a Norwegian project, there’s even more darkness. The problem is, for all its miasma and drone, it isn’t functionally different than a lot of other projects that tread similar sludgy, opaque waters.
The opening "Tunnel Of Love" starts with field recordings of urban menace: squealing metallic scrapes, emergency sirens and a few metric tons of reverb covering everything. Sounds continue to become deeper and more menacing, ominous hums and metallic clattering like an evil gamelan lead to an uneasy rhythm. The swells continue to just float ominously throughout before everything fades away quietly.
"Mystery Man" opens with delayed metallic guitar shards that cut through, and then just linger a bit, allowing the vestigial feedback elements to drone on and on. The sound and concept here is good, but the problem is that it is allowed almost too long to build and segue into the more complex tones and reverbed shrieks. It is a good idea that is too slow in its execution, and the payoff isn’t really as satisfying as the long build-up would indicate.
The longest track here, "Candle Light Dinner Actress" fares better, opening with cannon like thuds in the distance, processed string-like tones slowly weaving around the sparse ambience. In this case the length and slow pace is an asset, allowing a more diverse set of sounds to intermingle, such as the high register plucked strings and reverbed soaked saxophone notes. The track fades into subtle, quiet passages before roaring back with harsh, dissonant squeals and noise blasts.
The shorter, closing track, "Last Light" is more melancholy than the darker preceding ones, it is based more on a sustained hum rather than the layered structure of the rest of the album, based on dark processed strings and dark drones. Over the length of the preceding two tracks, this would probably be too static, but in the shorter duration it works better, and is one of the more captivating tracks here.
The problem with this album is that it simply doesn’t do anything that a legion of other artists haven’t done before. I’m not sure why this is suddenly labeled as "doom", but it fits in with the pantheon of dark ambient music of the mid-1990s that are difficult to remember specifically bands or albums, but almost anything could be easily traced to Bill Laswell somehow. This has the same feeling: it’s a nice take on dark, bleak music, but isn’t enough to stand out from the crowd, and probably won’t be memorable in five to ten years.
samples:
Read More
