Originally written by Dean Brown.
So, with the added ten pounds we’re all carrying around our midriffs and with the post-holiday depression sinking its razored claws deeper into our souls, leaving us all but a husk of our jovial former selves, what else could finish us all off more fittingly than a double dose of terrifying doom metal? Relapse Records might be held vicariously liable for leaving us swinging from the rafters, our gelatine bodies swaying in a post-mortem state, with the release of not one but two suicide-spurring albums this January: Indian’s From All Purity and Oblique to All Paths by Culted. Dean Brown bravely crosses sanity’s fringe to explore both albums…
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INDIAN – FROM ALL PURITY
A lot of writers—this hack included—will toss out rhetoric about how this band is “crushing” or that band is “the most frightening entity to feast upon our psyches,” and while extreme music can demand extremely hyperbolic descriptions, for a handful of bands—it’s a damn birthright.
As you may guess by the above introductory paragraph, Indian are one of those very bands; the Chicago, Illinois four-piece, over their decade-long existence, have inhabited a vast negative space. Dylan O’Toole and Will Lindsay (ex-Middian, ex-Nachtmystium), both of whom handle Indian’s vocals and guitars, share the same padded cell that straight-jackets metal’s most disturbed-sounding orators: guys like former Khanate and current Gnaw ghoul Alan Dubin and Oxbow’s pugilistic powerhouse Eugene Robinson. They own that rare (psychotic) ability to wrench every single drop of vitriol, lunacy, nihilism, etc. from the bile-filled pit of their persons, and on Indian’s fifth full-length, From All Purity, nothing has changed and nothing is diluted.
Backing their unrestrained exorcisms is drummer Bill Bumgardner (Lord Mantis) and bassist Ron DeFries, and all together these four guys aren’t the flashiest mob you’ll find operating within metal today, but, nonetheless, they create a harrowing experience by sounding more suffocating than outright brutal: lumbering from droning tempos where blackened doom riffs and sharp cymbals crashes slash and scrape against aching nerves, to massive mid-paced trawls, to openings of ill-quiet, to blasts of deafening noise.
“Rape”—a word that still maintains its weight—is the stark title given to the first song off From All Purity, and this track brings the listener back to the same torture chamber that housed 2011’s Guiltless; an album easily classified as a modern doom mainstay. Mechanical in its cold, repetitious nature, “Rape” is constructed to alienate those unfamiliar with Indian’s past work. It is gruelling, pummelling and intimidating—especially when the music slows right down to singular sledge-blows. “Directional” is tunnel-vision doom; where bands like YOB want to use doom as a launching pad for astral travel, Indian want to drag it back underground, with one intense riff steamrolling itself into the ground for six minutes. Conversely, “The Impetus Bleeds” is almost classy by comparison: there is funereal face to the riffs, in the same sphere as Evoken, although Indian constantly try to throttle the dignity out of it, and eventually manage to strip it bare.
From All Purity is intentionally ascetic and devoid of colour. Indian take doom back to its evil roots and let the agonizing vocals control the aggression levels: the dual screams form the serpent’s head while the music, as its tail, adds stability and bearing. Some might find this album too single-minded and antagonistic (“Clarify” is nothing more than a feedback-frazzled noise track, and it will purposely grate on you), with little in the way of ornamentation or massive changes in tempo, save for “Rhetoric of No”. (A noteworthy song where the drums crush like hammers of hopelessness and some of the vocals sound like a Tasmanian devil being eviscerated by a belt-sander.) “Disambiguation” does, however, have some semblance of melody gasping out from the black, and the surprising jolt of double-kick action from Bumgardner is a welcome release after such blunt drum workouts; at times the drums pound like Justin Broadrick’s drum machine stuck in “kill everything” mode—not like that’s a bad thing.
As ironic as it sounds, there is cathartic release found in the abject misery of extreme metal. And, as far as doom metal goes, Indian, for all their stubborn nihilistic tendencies, are a truly distressing—and essential—part of its canon.
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CULTED – OBLIQUE TO ALL PATHS
Culted are a prime product of the digital age. They are a band whose members have never met in person, as the group is geographically split with three members residing in Canada and one who lives in Sweden, and they write their music by volleying files back and forth over the internet—an increasingly common occurrence. Therefore, it’s testament to both our technological advancements and the digital chemistry of Culted’s four musicians—Michael Klassen (guitar, bass, percussion), Matthew Friesen (guitar, bass, percussion), Kevin Stevenson (drums), and the sole Swedish resident Daniel Jansson (vocals)—that their second studio album since forming in 2007, titled Oblique to All Paths, sounds so well developed, overtly experimental and poisonously potent in its translation.
Lengthy passages of disembodied doom metal make up the largest portion of Culted’s sonic space, but by fully engaging songs like the expansive (19-minute) opener “Brooding Hex,” elements of krautrock, ambient, drone, black metal and noise appear to be symbiotically attached to the earthly temple established by Sabbath at the tail-end of the 1960s. “Brooding Hex,” and Oblique to All Paths as a whole, will not give you instant gratification, as pillars of doom riffs are swallowed by eerie noise-scapes, leaving Goblin-esque nightmares whispering in your ear. While the section that recalls Aluk Tolodo’s modern interpretation of krautrock’s design, complete with a cyclic, elasticised bass-line, happens to be the most distinctive part of “Brooding Hex”: it flips between two themes as fissures form with each evolution before the song eventually implodes and bleeds out blaringly.
The rest of Oblique to All Paths consists of lengthy compositions—such as the lysergic “Intoxicant Immuration” and amalgam of psych undertones and fluent industrial overtones that amount to the ten-plus minutes of “Transmittal”—and more experimentally reined-in songs like “Illuminati,” which sounds like Furze jamming with Oranssi Pazuzu, and “March to the Wolves,” a song whose crooked krautrock groove will likely conciliate traditional doom fans. It is by no means an easy listen, and your satisfaction will be entirely reliant on your tolerance of songs that stretch out beyond doom’s riff-after-riff structures. Rather, there are lots of layers—Janssons’ distorted whispered vocals and venomous screams; indistinguishable spoken-word samples (“Distortion of the Nature of Mankind”); ambient intros and outros—used to lap and knot texture around the riffs and also outside of the riffs. In fact, the riffs, although powerful when pushed to the foreground, do not make this album, and moments of huge lurches are graspable with two hands: “Brooding Hex” houses a pounding sludge riff that wouldn’t have sat out of place on a Swarm of the Lotus record; “Illuminati” gets split wide open four minutes in by time-changing riff transformations; and the aforementioned “March to the Wolves” is explicitly written around a central riff.
The production quality of Oblique to All Paths lends an abstract tone; its distance is fitting of the outsider genres Culted touch upon as an internet-dependent collective—although the music loses some weight when the band unite as one. Each layer introduces itself loudly on repeat listens, adding to the paranoia at the pith of this album; there is also a hypnotic magnetism that locks and lures the listener back more than an album with a 19-minute songs should. And the reality that its creators wrote this music without human contact not only makes for an interesting selling point, the physical detachment creates a distinctive atmosphere without sounding disjointed musically.
The unorthodox songwriting methods of Culted seem befit the band’s perverse pursuits and Oblique to All Paths is an engrossing end result that becomes additionally so the more you submit to Culted’s demented dimensions.
