Stream from the Heavens

While funeral doom is a relatively new thing to me, I went into this album feeling confident that I would find something that I would love instantly. At the time I first heard this, I'd heard a grand total of 3 funeral doom bands, and had worshipped each one in its own way. First was Esoteric, who stuck me with their constantly moving sound and their ability to create urgency while playing at 60 beats per minute. Then was Ahab, which stuck me with its melody and atmosphere, and finally Wormphlegm violently crushed me with their prodigious slowly moving wall of pure heaviness. I knew of the various reviews of this album being highly inaccessible and difficult to get into music, but from my experience with the genre, I was sure this was going to click, and I was going to exclaim myself a convert of funeral doom. However, there was one thing I wasn't expecting, Stream from the Heavens is painfully hard to digest.

This is truly about as difficult to consume as music can get without being noise or poorly produced to the point of being static. This is for a number of reasons, ranging from production, to natural ability, to technique. Basically everything that Thergothon does on this album is intended to make it difficult to sit through, but often in a good way.

This album is slow, and I mean really, really slow, this is noticeably slower than any of the bands I mentioned earlier, which aren’t exactly Dark Angel. At times it feels almost drone like, due to the guitars being even more simplistic than those bands too, there are far fewer harmonies, just big slow single note chords, in true drone style. If anything, Stream from the Heavens struggles because it tries to be so minimalist in its design, it just doesn't do enough to get you involved. Most songs only have a few sections where the guitars do anything resembling a riff, for the main part they just play huge dirges with long drawn out power chords. The final drone similarity comes from the bassy feedback this entire album has running underneath. Some have called it eerie, but I have to disagree, it's a straight up annoyance. It just warbles along underneath far too loud and far too uncontrolled, randomly increasing and decreasing in volume and power, in it's defence, it makes the music fire out of your speakers and physically grab you, however it does nothing but elbow you in the side of the head, leaving some nasty bruising and a bad headache, particularly during moments of slightly higher speeds. This is the most annoying of the couple of production problems this album has.

The other production trouble is the general weakness of the guitars. One thing about all the other funeral doom bands I've heard which has made them easier to listen to than this is the thickness of the guitars, making the music sound huge and monolithic in it's slow moving sadness. It gives the music a powerful edge that makes it enjoyable on a simple riffing level. Thergothon sounds almost meek in comparison. The riffs are slower, and admittedly bigger in some ways, but stir images of a sole person solemn and alone, rather than the grand displays of misery that other bands produce. This lack of simple brutish aggression along with the atmospheric bleakness again, makes this harder to get into, there's nothing but sheer depression on offer here, pure and simple. Not to say its soft music, it's not; this is still extremely heavy, just not as heavy as their contemporaries. This is depressive music without the desperation or despair, it's as if that's already past, and this is the musical representation of the broken person who has already surrendered.

Such pretentious and wanky descriptions of the music aside, there is a very good side to the music which I was getting at. Thergothon is frightfully good at expressing desolation and melancholy. This is music geared at being emotionally moving and nothing else. So while on a purely musical level it's a difficult to listen to and deal with to album; in the right mindset this is total perfection.

There are a couple of things that can be appreciated at any time though, these songs are backed up by some stunning lyrics, unsurprisingly dealing with dark and depressive topics, and some pretty good vocals. The vocals range from a clean type, which are delivered in an average way at best, but again, this works in the same way as the music, it's all set up for you for you to be in a certain mood. If you were in the right mood for the music to be enjoyable and gripping, perfectly performed clean vocals just wouldn't work, they're highly geared towards sounding ethereal and haunting. Still, they’re quite listenable at all times. The growls are reminiscent of Demilich, but still sound a little closer to a standard growl, and are quite a lot less laughable. As with Demilich’s burps, they’re not very powerful, but the woefully low pitch makes up for that, this isn’t violent music, power isn’t what they’re going for. They're pretty much perfect for the album.

Thergothon's only release is the absolute perfect music for when you're in the mood for something completely soul devastating. Where the problem comes is that this music is so geared towards that state that it's honestly painful if you're not going for that. For this reason this is a hard album to review highly, because, unless you're a morbidly depressed person you won't find too many occasions when you'll be giving this a listen.