Echoes to Chaos

A quick look at the song titles immediately suggest something dark and nasty, a quick look at the song lengths suggest disappointment, a quick listen to the songs confirm it. It's just real poor rant 'n' riff that goes nowhere and has very, very little going for it.

The riffs are probably the strong point here (I use 'strong point' in the a very relative sense), sort of this really rough mix of Candlemass and denser slow sludge type bands; Ocean, Aldebaraan, Highgate and so on. I'm not sure if the super nasty, amateur "cheap microphone, cheap amp" really helps things much but it does increase the dank, desperate atmosphere that pervades the whole thing. Not to say there's much guitar work here that's all that great, mind, it fits the atmosphere but there's little in the way of interesting guitar work, riffs that get you banging your head, or truly dense, dark stuff. It's just there, doing it's mediocre thing.

Really though nothing here is all that great and there's a big "amateur dudes doing some doom improv" vibe- not a good thing, by the way- throughout the whole recording. Drums, which were probably recorded with a webcam mike go out of time constantly and could probably be played by a 4 year old with down's syndrome, and the vocals? Well, it's just a dude yelling a bit; not scary, not powerful, not melodic not interesting not terribly emotional not worth listening to! A shit package all round, really.

Combined with the downright shitty, verging-on-incomplete song structures (this wouldn't be good if the songs were twice as long, but it coulda been slighty more interesting), the inexcusably crap production, well, there's just nothing going for this record. I spent about 20 minutes writing this review which is arguably more time then they spent making this record. Avoid!

A while ago I got an e-mail from this band, asking me for my address to send their demo to. I had actually forgotten all about it when I received it, and didn’t come to think of it until I one day cleared my inbox of old e-mails. I then realized it wasn’t an entirely unknown act, I had at least had e-mail contact with them in the past. But I still had no idea what they sounded like, eventhough the name should’ve given me a hint.

‘Cause this is surely doom, and it sounds like the doom for one man in particular. The extremely torturous vocals are bone-chilling. Imagine the vocals of Shining and Silencer taken to a whole other dimension of suffering. It doesn’t have the same depressive edge as the previously mentioned acts, but more of a desperate screams from a lone man, slowly being tortured to death, begging for a quick release. One of my brother’s actually referred to it as ‘tortured whale screams’, and it is a fitting description. And I absolutely love it! The music however is nowhere near black metal, and this is doom metal to the core, classic doom. There’s a hint of the late 70ies Black Sabbath vibe to the guitars, combined with the roughness of early Worship and heaviness of Candlemass. Three very diverse bands to compare it to, but it really sounds like that. The slow, rhythmic, trance-inducing funeral drumming adds another spin on the entire thing. And the end result is seriously anguish-burdened doom metal, taking the best from all corners of the genre, with their own spin on the whole outtake.

I’m extremely impressed by this demo, and it is one that will be played many, many times. Highly recommended. I guess the sound could have had some more depth and punch, but who can complain with such a marvelous first impression.

Originally written for http://www.mylastchapter.net

The Doom, as expected for a band with such a minimalist name, play very minimalist doom metal, which travels at a fairly consistent slow speed. As a whole I'd probably compare the band to the heavier doom sections of Gallhammer, or the filler type slow chug kind of parts of Reverend Bizarre, but much better thanks to the dirty guitar sound, they sound even more ritualistic than the aforementioned band during those sections. It's all quite minimalistic, the guitar slowly chugs/buzzes away over the top of always very simplistic time keeping drums, with only a few lines of vocals in each song. None of the songs have real solos or anything flashy beyond occasional fuzzed out guitar effects trailing out at the end of most of the songs. This is pure minimalistic music, there's not a moment of flashy technical showing off.

Vocally, Nightcrawler stands out from a lot of their contemporaries, opting to use a deranged howl, not unlike a far more controlled Nattramn, rather than the growls and rasps of most bands playing this style of music. Lyrically, the band's song titles pretty easily sum up what you'll be getting, short little three word lines about general grimness. The production is fairly clear, showcasing the guitars while letting them retain their murky tone and quite a lot of sinister fuzz. This is a self produced release, so occasionally you'll hear odd moments of degraded sound or some random background noise, but overall, this release sounds good.

Where the band has a problem is that it all sounds really, really similar. If the little fade outs on the end of each song were removed, I'd easily believe it was a singular 18 minute track. Of the 6 songs, they basically sound like two different songs. You've got songs which sound like Insanity Begins, which involve heavier drumming, and tracks which sound like Desolation, which use a 4/4 beat. The riffs are pretty much the same no matter what, and as is the tempo. Luckily, the general similarity of the tracks is actually not as big of a problem that it could be. Unlike most albums which have little to no variation, where you'll think "This is pretty much the same as track one, I'm just going to listen to track one again", you don't here, it's too similar to have moments that sound worse than the rest, it's not an inferior copy; it's an exact copy. Sure, it's all the same, but the dirty, ritualistic environment invites you to wallow in its misery and darkness, and regardless of song which is playing, it achieves its goal well. It's slow, dirty doom, some repetition is to be expected.

The second problem is that these songs don't really go anywhere, they'll make you bleakly move your head in a crawling, sinister rhythm, but they don't really don't do much else. They're very engaging while you listen to them, but once you're done with EP, you'll realise the songs don't really take you anywhere. A quick look at the song lengths shows that all the songs are only about three minutes long, and when the songs are as slow as these are that isn’t a lot of time to do much. Each song will use four or five different riffs, but they don't really build or anything, just kind of happen. When the songs end with their usual piece of fuzzed out guitar feedback it's quite a shock because there are really no hints that the song should be finishing when it does. You get the feeling if the songs were a couple of minutes longer they could build to be so much more.

With that said, Echoes to Chaos is an enjoyable listen, all the riffs are good, while not terribly inventive. Every song successfully creates a bleak atmosphere, and every riff will make you slowly rock your body like some kind of zombie. There isn’t a single moment of bad music on this EP, but it does seem as if this is because they only wrote 5 riffs, and have just made extremely slight changes to them for all the other ones. For the case of an 18 minute EP, the sheer repetition isn’t much of a problem, but if this were a full length this would get pretty dull.

The Doom are a very promising band, Echoes to Chaos lacks in the song writing department, but they've proved they can create good atmosphere and addictive music, not to mention that with the howled vocals they have an element that makes them stand out from the crowd. But at this point of time they're not achieving what they could. Once the structuring comes this band will be a force to be reckoned with, but until then, they're still that little bit lacking.

1. Insanity begins
2. Echoes to chaos
3. Desolation
4. Nothingness
5. Pain...
6. The end

Really, what would the reader expect from such tracks titles? Do they not give some hints towards certain facets of the metal circus? Well, they are not far from what death metal bands might use for their outputs, so much is certain, but the American band The Doom is a bit away from this approach. Interestingly, the band name has already the genre in it and the musicians behind it stick to a somehow extreme style of it over the course of their first demo.

A somehow surprising aspect is the short length of the compositions. Four minutes or less is the maximum the band offers here and as the music is generally dark and somehow depressive, the ideas are offered here in a condensed way and excessive repetitions are avoided therefore. The songs are pretty straight-forwards and have generally no twists or turns; if this is good or bad depends on the listener, yet, the art has received some amount of shallowness through this nevertheless.

Insanity, chaos, desolation, nothingness, pain, end, these all are phrases that describe the music of «The Doom» pretty well. When taking the band name further into consideration, then it is quite obvious what the listener has to expect: slow played doom metal with some dark atmosphere, heavily bass-loaded songs and a vocalist whose voice sound like someone left behind in the middle of nowhere, after making an awkward remark over someone else’s towel. While salvation is not likely to come any time soon, he screams out his annoyance over the world, his existence and this situation with the hope that someone would recognize it and relief him from the mess he is currently in.

Yes, «The Doom» play a dirty piece of music on their first release. The chords sound rather like being loosely connected, while the songs have been written in a linear and not too complex fashion. Further can be noted that there is not much going on at a certain time and the doom worship minimalism in a lot of respect. Perhaps these are also the short-comings of this piece of art. Nice moments now and then, some neat dark atmosphere and a solid performance can be found, but what else? Six songs, eighteen minutes and by no means equally distributed among them is what the listener is confronted with. Just as one song has been able to build up the atmosphere it begins to break down again, because the end of the song is already reached. This EP can be described as a good starting point, but more praises could certainly not be justified.

Interestingly, once the CD is over and begins a new turn, there is no break and the music flows neatly to where is once started. In some way this releases creates the impression of endless desperation and darkness. Seventy point can still be given, even though the compositions are generally too short and lack of complexity as well as interesting twists or turns; the exception would be the last track.