A stunning album following a trail somewhere along the highway of the mightiest forerunners of the genre. The album does not come out as an equal, but more as a sequel with its heavy weight that carries the music with maritime and celestial themes. The band is constructing towers of sound with the riffs, the bass, and the drums that embrace and push two growling vocalists into memorable harmonies.
The genre Sludge Metal emerged decades ago from the dense and intense roars of Post-Hardcore with the sonorous heavy elements of Doom-Metal. The forerunners altered the course of the genre Sludge by adding complex textures with synths and layers of dense guitars belching melodic themes with vocalists screaming and growling, sometimes making hymn-like songs. In doing so, they created an ambience in the sonics that made the music at the same time extremely heavy and swelling with ethereal elements.
Bands in this genre make long songs, as do Partholón, and through this are able to unfold impressive musical ideas, immersed in layers of music accompanied by thunderous drums and low-end bass that blends much of the heaviness with the depth and width of the guitar layers.
This album is such a great, yet natural, step forward from what these Irishmen released back in 2016 and the split in 2018. They began writing the new album, touring, and then the pandemic hit. That time was bad, it isolated us. But, as time has shown, it also gave bands like Partholón time to refine and develop their compositions further. And, wow, did they use that time well! When you notice that they have teamed up with Mikhail Kurochkin, the sound magician from the St Petersburg scene and bands like Pwyll and Somn, on the production side, you just know the result will be immaculate into the tiniest detail.
Yes, the tiniest detail. Because within the swelling, undulating, thunderous music, there are subtle and sublime details you might not notice on the first onslaught from the music, not even the second or third maybe. An example is in the first song ”Skin of the Beast”: As the heavy riffs embrace the growling vocals and begin a repetitive melodic theme, tiny bursts of sound are emanating from the dense stem of music, like steam from a heavy locomotive. Further on in this song, you will notice far-away shouts from other vocals when the music simmers down leaving only the main growls. When the music fuses back again, two vocalists are answering each other. Throughout the album, the use of two vocalists - one with deep, dry growls and one with a higher pitch on the growls - creates a dynamic seldom heard in this kind of music. I will not spoil your listening experience with more details about the small hidden sonic gems on this album. Just listen carefully and find out.
With two vocalists the band can compose music where these two meet in some kind of harmony and growls out musical themes that might blossom within a few days into delightful earworms. This is certainly true in the album´s second song ”Gathered in Circles” where the two voices begin to answer each other; two intense growling voices perfectly intertwined - either singing in harmony or answering the other. The pattern of the song becomes repetitive and engaging as the melodic theme is supported by the heavy rhythm section.
This also happens on the immensely imaginative last song ”We Swallow the Ocean” as there is a build-up in the song´s opening with bass drums rumbling beneath the guitars before the vocalists begin to sing a memorable musical theme in clean harmony. After the prolonged introduction, the music swells with an engaging melodic heaviness where one higher-pitched guitar leads the way through the dense music before growls are back underlined by unwavering thunderous drumming. The tight music surges forward embracing the vocals and one guitar runs parallel with swirling riffs. Then it loosens up again and drives forward with diverse and relentless drumming with a grooving bass and melodies emanating from the distorted riffing guitars. The song is a flawless masterpiece with engaging twists and turns. Toward the end, there is an eerie touch of dissonance before the music pans out with sound effects and soft droplets from a piano and an indistinct male voice begins to speak throughout the light piano rain. It is like the cover of the album was made for the last minutes of the final song.
Another feat of this album are the lyrics. An example can be found on the extremely heavy and varied song ”Pillars”. The song opens extremely heavy, with guitars tuned down into a Doom-sound followed by heavy bass and steady drumming. The music eases and a dense melodic theme emanates as the growls sing the chorus “We were born between pillars / In a chaos of stars / To dream past the bridge and fade away”.
On YouTube there is a documentary of the album’s making, the ideas behind the songs, the music, and lyrics. It is stories of seafarers, murders, and beheading, but also staring up at the sky every night during the pandemic and discovering how everything gathers in circles, thus coming up with lines like the following on the song ”Gathered in Circles”: ”My finger traces circles across the sky / To see reaction as a progress destroys our minds.”
