IV: The Silence of the Perpetual Choir in Heaven

This is what drone and sludge mixed with funeral doom should sound like. There are few bands that can pull off this kind of style well. Drone, by its nature, is not very emotive. It is just loud heavy riffs that go on at times for really long timespans, and most of it I couldn’t care less about. It is one of the things that make me pause before I explore a band’s discography, the other having multiple full lengths in a single year or the “/Ambient” tag. Funeral doom, on the other hand, is usually pure emotion behind the riffs, and Lost Hours has struck a balance between the two.

It’s not as noisy in production as III, but it starts off similarly with a sludgy melodic doom/death riff straight out of grandma’s funeral. ...And Masses Spat Upon All That is Holy switches things up every so often, it is riff after riff of emotional splendor and crushing heaviness. It ends with a high soaring finale based on the opening riff that reminds me a bit of Mournful Congregation.

The poignantly titled Roman Polanski is a Monster starts off with a melancholic piano with a sample of the Heaven’s Gate initiation tape. Even without looking up the context, I had a strong feeling it was one of those suicide cult things… then it just goes to hell. Suffocating, crushing, devoid of feeling. Proper drone/doom metal played at an absolutely tectonic pace. Yet, midway in, as the main riff is chugging along with the weight of twenty elephants, a soaring post-rock tremolo adds some figment of melancholy to the song… as if crying out from the depths of the abyss... then it just gets heavier and grimier with lower almost goregrind style vocals belching from the void. It’s like those twenty elephants are all sitting on you. The ending of this track is unsettling, as after the final sludge-bomb riff and tortured vocals ring out and the feedback just drones, a little bit more of that damn Heaven’s Gate initiation tape plays, “we’re on the threshold of the end of this civilization, because it’s about to be recycled…”