Life Drawing

In 2012, Portland-based sludge-doom act Stoneburner released their debut full length album, Sickness Will Pass. Whether it was some kind of cruel joke or the band truly believed that the sickness would pass, 2014 sees Stoneburner return with an even sicker, more infected album, Life Drawing; an album devoid of any hope or promises to cling to. Life Drawing features over an hour of bleak and harrowing sludge that was influenced by the likes of Neurosis and EyeHateGod, with touches of the atmospheric and progressive nature of acts like Isis and Cult of Luna.

While Life Drawing is an exceedingly heavy and crushing listen, that’s not what makes this album as potent as it is. This is one of those albums that grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go. Like the legends of Dickens, Life Drawing is the antagonizing ghost that shows you what you’ve done with your life and forces you to realize that it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. Actually, there’s not even a fucking unicorn anywhere in sight. The world is dark and sinister and no matter how hard you try, you will get knocked down. It shows you just how truly difficult it is to get back up after that and really makes you question whether or not it’s worth it. Sure there are brief glimpses of joy woven throughout the tapestry, rising towards the light like tendrils of ivy at the beginning of spring, but the true power of Life Drawing is its ability to show that your world is dirty and depressing and there really is no escape.

The album opens with “Some Can”, a trudging, facebreaker with incorporates some underlying heavy grooves mixed with the mid-period Neurosis styled atmospheric sludge. Even though the album remains dismal throughout, the pace does pick up, but it’s a gradual swell that you can barely discern until wave after wave of crushing riffs and pounding drums cascade over your head, continuously threatening to pull you out to sea. “Caged Bird” shows the same style of caustic sludge, but with a slightly progressive feel to it, with a constant and precise riff a la Cult of Luna, before falling off the edge into a mire of down tuned, down tempo muck. The focus throughout is surely on these downtrodden hymns, but there always seem to be those tendrils creeping towards the light, such as the lead progression during “An Apology to a Friend in Need”, as the band’s ugly and menacing sound collides with uplifting, progressive chord structures.

Even after all of the murky sludge and bone crushing heaviness, it really is tracks like “Pale New Eyes” and “The Phoenix” that show the mastery these guys have over their sound. Both feature wallowing melodies and slow-burning introductions that, like Through Silver in Blood era Neurosis, serve to completely immerse you into a false sense of security before the walls come down and you’re left to cower in the corner as walls of crushing heaviness continue to assault your senses. The incorporation of subtle melodies and progressively-tinged leads keep your head above water, but only momentarily. Stoneburner has this ability to switch gears from bleak atmospherics into mucky heaviness without giving any indication that it’s about to happen. For all of the back and forth, though, Life Drawing remains a cohesively draining opus that flows naturally.

Life Drawing is an all-enveloping listen that will remind you why it’s hard to keep moving. In the words of Thomas Hobbes, “life is nasty, brutish and short” and nothing really seems to exemplify this statement as well as Stoneburner’s latest offering. No doubt, fans of Neurosis, Cult of Luna and EyeHateGod will clearly find something to sink their teeth into here, as each successive listen unveils another layer of misery and hopelessness. Truly, this is one of the most impressive atmospheric sludge albums to hit in quite some time and fans of any other bands mentioned in this review would do themselves a favor by finding this.

Written for The Metal Observer:
http://www.metal-observer.com/