Given that the drone/doom supergroup Khanate has officially dissolved, there are a slew of similar artists aching to seize that slow, tar covered crown of grimy sludge metal, and Trees do a pretty good job of imitating the aforementioned artists. The problem is, does the world really need more of a style that shamelessly goes nowhere?
Khanate did pioneer that slow motion, long sustaining chords mixed with drum outbursts and inhuman shrieks at fractional BPM rates. However, under the nuanced eyes of James Plotkin and Stephen O’Malley, there was enough postproduction tweaking and filtering to give the admittedly simplistic sound a greater, more captivating depth. Trees, however, sound more like a live take on this kind of music, stripping away the studio wizardry and just leaving the conventional elements.
The problem with this is, stripped down the basics are only interesting for so long. Even Sunn O))) finally realized they had to do more than just let power chords sustain for an hour to make an interesting record. Here, there are two side-long tracks of that basic formula, which does retain some of the qualities of Khanate, but the music is more barren, the vocals feel more theatrical metal as opposed to Alan Dubin’s unearthly cries, and the entire proceedings feel like a pure imitation or cover band that nails the major points, but doesn’t pick up the subtleties that are necessary to transition from a spectacle to an actual enjoyable listening experience.
Hell, even the “big boys” in this genre can honestly be hard to sit through in the long term. It’s the type of music I need to be in a specific mood to enjoy, and thus never makes my frequent rotation playlist. I’m sure those who are more devoted to this genre could tear me apart on what the differences are, but for the average listener, those differences are too minute to worry about.
Trees have made a competent drone/sludge/doom album for sure, but there is just too little to cause it to stick out among the other similar projects on the map. People who are more than happy to just hear more of the slow motion head banging and black metal screams will definitely appreciate this, but for the rest of us, it’s just not that notable.
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