Year Of Metal #043: Thou - Heaven
Another journey to Louisiana here, which is evidently the heartland of American sludge metal. Thou share a scene and a region with Eyehategod, but this intense and fearsome 2014 album is a different beast. To say it’s not a terrifically fun listen isn’t intended as a dig at all, but it’s fair to say it’s a demanding record. While Heathen isn’t a sonic endurance test, it’s a long piece of work, but one with some breathtaking moments.
To get needlessly bogged down in subgenre chat once again, I wonder if they’ve sludgier records in their canon, because this feels more like doom to me, with some tracks that lean closer to ambient black metal. Opener “Free Will” is a trip. A few minutes of pretty plucking start us off, but we know that’s not going to last, and soon enough the driving, downtuned riffs start. When the vocals kick in at last, though, it’s like everything explodes. The track is stretched and dragged out. The anguished vocals of Bryan Funck (whose death screams are remarkably clear) topline proceedings, but the layered guitars have a ton to listen out for.
Building patiently is the name of the game on Heathen. “Feral Fawn” takes nearly 10 minutes to reach an endpoint. This one’s deliriously heavy, with Josh Nee’s drums sounding particularly monumental. Unlike a lot of metal percussionists, he’s not filling the track with lightning quick fills - he’s just hitting his drums incredibly hard. I love the gloopy, shuffling end of this track, like some horrible beast just about clinging onto life, dragging itself along the ground.
“Into The Marshlands” is probably my favourite song on the record. At a scant seven minutes, it’s relatively direct, getting down to brass tacks right away with a simple, thumping, classically doom riff. It’s the archetypal sound - not too much distortion but played with passion on some thick, thick strings. When it switches to a syncopated pattern and the drums start to loosen up, there’s a real injection of energy, even if we’re still moving at a pretty slow pace. The track’s relatively stripped back - it’s a nice change after the complexity of the first few cuts.
I like “In Defiance Of The Sages” a lot too, especially for a semi-interpolation of some Grieg mid way through. They creep their way through a couple of bars of “Hall Of The Mountain King” before launching into the closest this record gets to a standard solo. The instrument practically howls in pain as notes stretched and pulled around.
Closer “Ode To Physical Pain” certainly lives up to its name. Ending the record on a high, this is the most fearsome track on offer, an all-out sensory assault to finish things on a violent note. It’s not a record for the faint hearted or the impatient, and perhaps not something you’re likely to slip on and zone out to. It doesn’t have the hypnotic drone of my preferred flavour of doom, nor does it have quite so much of a wide palette as some of the better symphonic black stuff. As an album, though, it’s cohesive and remarkably gripping for a long stretch.
