Two of our favourite arseclowns decided to get together, in total darkness apparently (I have no idea why, our light bulbs work just fine, fucking weirdos..), to review an album that has brought much excitement to the ranks of The Metal Wanderlust. Enough said really, read on and enjoy!
ThatAstronautGuy.
Ahh 2020, a year where PC assholes will continue to get butt hurt over literally anything and I’ll be still listening to ignorant Metal that everyone hates. Especially my mom, HI MOM. Yes my mom is a poser and yes Iron Bonehead Productions continues to be great. After an extremely solid 2019 we are gifted with a new full length from the depths of the swamps in Florida from the mighty WORM! My good buddy the PCO and I are at the TMW mansion in total darkness while this vile piece of flesh rots our eardrums.
Immediately soaked in “Putrefying Swamp Mists at Dusk” this four minute intro track sets the mood with ominous synths, but there is nothing corny about this at all, think a doomier side of Perverted Ceremony. set straight out of a horror movie you are hit with rotted vocals soaked in disgusting reverb and slow cooking riffs that just place you in a mould filled body of water.
The whole thing feels like a Nightmare on Elm Street dream, like someone is toying with you before they kill and dismember your body. “Rotting Spheres of Sentient Black” along with “Apparitions of Gloom” focus on tons of riffs and doesn’t feel so slow and doomy through this part of the album. Probably my two favourites off the album. Especially that solo in the last mentioned..
The two longest songs are at the end, a nine minute sludgy that keeps you, “Melting in the Necrosphere” and makes you stay in “Abysmal Dimensions” for another eleven minutes after that! There’s more than just Doom elements to this band, and they blend all of it so well. Sometimes it sounds like Beherit but then all the time it sounds like fucking Worm! A great band with unique traits that truly make this album damn near perfect.
If Doom isn’t your thing I highly suggest giving this a go to try to persuade you differently as this is original in all of the sense of the word. Are there inspirations you can hear? Sure, but this feels like this band has perfectly captured that sound between inspiration and complete originality.
Rating – 5/5
Progressive Cave Ogier.
Underground Metal is like higher physics. Explaining the magic of it to uninitiated is often simply a mission impossible. Musical performances within the genre are not clock work precision. Music itself is very rarely the complicated and intelligent web of patterns you’d expect from King Crimson, for example. Yet, there is a highly enchanting quality to it. There’s quite nothing like the wobbly walk of a zombie in a B class horror movie and such is the case with the underground Extreme Metal as well. It’s not classy, and it is not even supposed to be. The splendour of a cheap slasher film, the gloominess of an old black and white horror film and satanic, buzzing horror of an old Beherit album. All of them equally shabby, eerie and enticing.
Worm is that – underground Extreme Metal, if anything. They seem to have all the secret ingredients. The despairing, melancholy lead work of early Rotting Christ. The clumsy, but effective riffs that a doomier version of Goatlord might be playing. Their second album “Gloomlord” sounds actually a lot like Beherit jamming with Rippikoulu and in their highly original hybrid of Black Metal and Death Doom lies the bottom line to the albums brilliance too.
Just like brother Astro, I too find “Apparitions of Gloom” to be the highest piece of art this record has to offer. That song is like the mysterious gateway from where you enter to the magical half of the album. The deep end and the otherworldly realms of Worm, where the doomed walk and try to form the slowest circle pit ever seen in the domain of the damned. After the slightly slow start, the album starts to take you to places after “Apparitions“. “Melting in the Necrosphere” and “Abysmal Dimensions” keep offering one musical secret after another, until the album eventually ends and fades abruptly. Actually, the right thing to do with “Gloomlord“ is to listen it in full. It is definitely a state of mind album. Lifting one song out of the context is like watching a trailer, really. Nothing even close to the whole movie and in this case, it is the main feature film we are all after. or at least that’s where we should be paying our collective attention to. This is not a record for the hit song oriented, but an utterly rewarding work for those willing to see it through and give it time. It is an album with a capital A, where the journey is the most important thing.
So, it is safe to say that “Gloomlord“ is an underground Metal masterpiece. It is the first real contender for a TOP-10 ranking 2020 has offered so far and it is a record its creators should be extremely proud of. With it, they are charting the untraveled road, somewhere between the marshes of Doom and whispering forests of Black Metal. That alone is something very rare today, to hear a new interpretation of the metal phenomenon we all love. And if anything said here, by yours truly or brother Astro, is not enough to convince you, then go and bloody listen to the record. Now! Do it! Then go and give these lads all the support they deserve. Without the slightly monotonous “Rotting Spheres of Sentient Black”, this would be a 5/5 with great ease and as I am one of those a pain in the arse journalist types, I’ll give it an ALMOST full ranking. Because every song besides the before mentioned (yes, the intro too!) is spot on, it’s just this one number I cannot fully underline.
So, after all the babbling and before we enter the emptiness of vanishing (or vanishing of emptiness, depending on the viewpoint) with brother Astro, let me make one thing clear: This record, even with it’s flaws, or maybe just because of them, is underground Extreme Metal at it’s purest form. Obscure, eerie and loaded with demo-like enchantment. If the world is fair, it will be remembered for it’s merits for decades. Maybe not by many, but definitely by the selected few.
Rating – 4.7/5
Get Wormed right here!
https://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com/album/worm-gloomlord
The Metal Wanderlust 