Echoes from Beneath

It's been six ridiculously long years since I willingly wrote one of these reviews for a... what do you call it? The noisy round shiny thing with the thumping and burps. With such a long lay-off I think I can be forgiven for wanting to ease myself in with something nice and simple, and Slugathor's final album eases me in like a spit soaked pinkie because it literally consists of two easily identified things and absolutely nothing else. They do rolling and thunderous Bolt Thrower-esque chugging beatdowns, and they do spooky Finndeath leads. This is the entirety of Echoes From Beneath and Slugathor in general. It's simple, it's cool, and slugs are funny little slime penises; what's not to love?

Thing #1: The basic blueprint for echoing under stuff is just rattling about with a steady battery of crunchy mid-paced but driving bulldozer grooves that knuckledragging OSDM bands are drawn towards. It's something we've seen a bunch of times, but Slugathor are both really damn good at it and have an astounding production which makes zoning out difficult.

As far as nuts and bolts riff composition goes the big selling point is how they manage to make catchy and memorable grooves out of quite percussive music. Slugathor have the rare ability to make a long slow hook which can be easily comprehended and grooved along to out of much faster and more pummelling instrumentation. I'd describe it as a death metal version of how Hate Forest manage to make their lengthy memorable melodic hooks and grooves out of lightning fast picking and blasting. The double bass relentlessly pounds along in unison with low string chugging but they manage to drag the emphasis away from the individual whacks and into a bigger and more appealing earworm without sacrificing the visceral pleasure of the DUGADUGADUGA beatdown.

The guitar sound is quite clear and punchy with none of the decrepitude typically found on filthier facepounders like Undergang or Rottrevore, but it avoids any kind of overly slick or plastic feeling through sheer depth and weight. It's on the Those Once Loyal wavelength with a big, clear low end driving everything, but even more bottomed out for added heaviness. The drums are also quite flat and beefy to give that churning low end all the brutal force that could possibly be extracted. Back in 2009 this was my favourite "modern" production job ever, and honestly I don't have much of an argument to suggest that's changed.

Thing #2: With this rhythm production, playing style and bottomed out growls focussing on the low end, there's a whole untapped high end for the leads to fill in. Thanks to the overwhelmingly distinct difference in tone and impact they never ever fail to completely captivate before you even consider just how damn good they are. They're stereotypical Finndeath leads, possibly a bit longer and more expanded upon than the norm, but pretty familiar at any rate. If you've heard Demigod, Abhorrence, Demilich or Adramelech you know what's up; the churning turns into a doomy dirge and a slow, wavering lead kicks in which is equal parts melodic, cartoonishly spooky sounding and just plain odd. These Finnish standards are executed extremely well in a setting which lets them pop more than the av-er-age haunted skeleton ghost bear. There's not much more to say about them beyond "Finndeath", "outstanding", and "has room to shine", so I won't.

Uh... Ancillary Thing? Shut up it's still just two things and I'm not re-writing my intro and structure. Fight me. Echoes From Beneath is those two things alternating for a bit over half an hour. This leads to an issue of identity loss between the tracks, and I don't simply mean repetition. Now sure, this is pretty damn consistent and similar the whole way through, but I'm pretty sure I could make dumbass mouthsounds with doofy nerroowws and dododoDOWRdodododoDOWR DUNdoDUNNROWWOW's and embarrass myself so deeply I never stop feeling shame, but more importantly I could also replicate almost every riff and lead on this album; the hooks are that strong. The issue is I couldn't tell you which order they go in.

In a macro sense it doesn't really matter in the context of a full album, but I can't help but feel the songwriting and songs themselves are fairly faceless. Fellow 2009 alumni Funebrarum may have used Finndeath leads on half of The Sleep of Morbid Dreams’ tracklist, but I can then walk that back to which riffs and sections linked to it to identify its impact on the flow of the entire album with minimal effort. With Slugathor however I draw a complete blank outside of the opening track, the higher pitched lick at the start of Last Rites and the closing slow down sequence. They're just cool parts which all serve the same purpose and any riff could reasonably be paired with any melody. This has kept Echoes From Beneath as an album I've been coming back to for over a decade, but this lack of real standout "holy shit this fucking song!" tracks keeps it just below the tougher gastropods. The snails I guess.