Hearken

I kind of remember listening to Encircling Sea back in the day. They’re much sludgier now, but I remember them being much more of a post-black band back in the day. The debut album is what I remember the most. It consisted of one song of nearly 50 minutes. It had some cool sections, but goddamn did it drag in parts and it tried to incorporate too many styles without knowing how to integrate them in a way that had any sense of flow. Looking back, I think I never really stuck with Encircling Sea because they had a propensity for shooting themselves in the foot and squandering their potential. While Hearken is a pretty good album, these tendencies roar up to the surface again and stop them from making what surely could have been a great one.

Hearken starts fucking swimmingly, with “Bloodstone” being a sludge behemoth. It sounds pretty much like Cult of Luna, and I don’t care if it’s essentially worship music because they’re so ridiculously good at it. The riffs are massive enough to crush a city blocks, the gruff bellows sound like a forgotten titan screaming out of the abyss and the atmospheric sections are fantastic at building tension and providing a strong sense of dynamics. The following song “Elderfire” proceeds down the sludge route but more of the black metal influence permeates the sound. The massive groggy riffs slowly shifting like tectonic plates are still there and the beastly bellows still sound like they could swallow planets, but a more blackened aesthetic is ushered in. We even have some blast beats running under sludge riffs, which they manage to pull off quite well and makes for a damn cool contrast.

Hearken would have been a great album if it followed the lead of the first two songs. Instead, Encircling Sea choose to blue ball us and switch to a more post-black sound. They keep the roaring sludge bellows thankfully, and these remain the most interesting part of the album. There are completely fine at the more post-black stuff, but they were so good at the sludge and I don’t see why they needed to switch it up. The riffs sludge riffs were massive, and the black metal ones are still decent and have more teeth than your average post/atmospheric fare, but they just can’t compare. The interplay between the atmospheric sections and the riff just doesn’t gel as well, either.

In all honesty, Hearken is still a good album. But it could have been a great one. I really don’t understand why they had to do away with a good thing after just two songs, but here we are. This could have been a sludge modern classic, but they did their best to shoot themselves in the foot. There are still some cool sludge parts in the rest of the album, but the more post-black leanings just don’t work that well. Oh well, "Bloodstone" will still make a killer addition to a modern sludge playlist.