Tohcoth

Aarni's 'Tohcoth' is an arduous fucking slog of an album which is primarily known as 'Bathos'' crushingly disappointing follow-up, almost half a decade in the making and displaying very well that the time was used poorly. Now, I agree with the general sentiment of the doom scene that 'Tohcoth' is fucking horrible, but I don't agree that this comes as a surprise. 'Bathos' was a very good album but it teetered on the edge of shit throughout its course due to its twee sensibilities and self-congratulatory infatuation with being weird for the sake of weirdness. It actually managed to walk the tightrope, but 'Tohcoth' falls off inside of thirty seconds and splatters itself on the floor in front of the circus' horrified onlookers. Mothers, shield your children's eyes to this motherfucker.

One of the most egregious flaws of this album is that at over seventy minutes this is fucking agonizing to sit through, especially when you consider how little actually happens in it. Calling this a 'metal album' is something of a stretch; it's more like an experimental rock album with some weird doom influences sometimes. This, as usual, isn't necessarily a bad thing, but metal musicians making rock music rarely goes well, and 'Tohcoth' is a perfect example. It's pretty telling that the intro track, 'Coniuratio Sadoquae' appears to have way more effort put into it than any of the 'real' songs; this is a theme that continues throughout the album. Whenever Master Warjomaa paints himself into a melodic or structural corner, he doesn't do something creative to break out of it, he just kinds of stammers and hems and haws his way through the inconvenience until you eventually forget where you came from. Remember that episode of 'The Office' where Michael claims to have a surprise waiting for the employees and when confronted about it proceeds to obviously and awkwardly stall for time while everyone files past him? This is the musical version of that.

'The Sound Of One I Opening' is the best example of the album as a whole: it goes absolutely fucking nowhere in its nine minutes of excruciating, aimless noodling. Yes, there's a lot of different stuff going on between the guitar and bass, but none of it means anything or progresses to any sort of logical point. This is not 'experimental' or 'progressive' or even 'chaotic', it's just poorly constructed. What makes this even more painful is that there are small flickers of brilliance in certain melodies on random tracks that are immediately crushed under the weight of the album's meandering, slothlike jackoff session. The core of this music seems lifted from '70s psych rock, so why does this feel so painfully dry and uninteresting? Well, the production doesn't help: it's as flat and lifeless as possible, with absolutely no auditory richness or space to sink your teeth into. Really though, that's the least offensive part of 'Tohcoth'.

The entirety of 'Tohcoth' is composed of random little bits and pieces of music that seem to be there to please only the musician behind them, not the listener. This would be an admirable feature if the album didn't happen to be completely fucking terrible. Enormous tracks of overly quirky clean guitar lines, very suspect drum programming, and overwrought, faux-ironic clean vocals really don't lead me to think that this was a 'serious' album or even one composed with the intent of being listenable. 'Tohcoth' is a fucking endurance test, not an album to be listened to for the sake of enjoyment.

'Tohcoth' sucks, 'Bathos' is good, just get that one and pretend this doesn't exist.