Coltsblood – Obscured Into Nebulous Dusk Review

[Artwork by Louis Daguerre]

If Esoteric’s guitar leads are the sound of the stars, Coltsblood’s echo the Earth’s interior, at least a subterrain pulled straight from Jules Verne’s fantastical imagination. The quintessential Coltsbloodian lead is like digging miles deep, your face smeared with soot, a canary chirping in a cage behind you. And then you see it, this gleaming stream of molten metal, a flowing river of quicksilver that, illuminated by headlamps, carves its way through the darkness.

Take the opener of Coltsblood’s third album, Obscured into Nebulous Dusk. “Until the Eidolon Falls” begins with a deep bass thrum, the kind of pushed-to-its-limits, exceeding-the-redline maximalism that makes sludge sludge. “We tune to A and use shitty old eBay salvaged gear turned up to 11, so our sound is really clipping and over-driven,” guitarist Jemma McNulty told Distorted Sound in 2017 about the UK trio’s sonic loadout. And it’d be fine if Coltsblood continued to till those over-driven fields. It’s a hell of a racket that shakes your whole skeleton. But then the leads come in, and the good goes glorious. McNulty, with a guest assist from Corrupt Moral Altar’s Adam Clarkson, plays these glistening beams of light, matching the way the sun illuminates the gossamer evening fog of Obscured into Nebulous Dusk‘s album art, the Louis Daguerre painting “The Ruins of Holyrood Chapel.” There’s something phantasmal about those leads, sure. But they also feel so earthbound, so from the gut, a relatable kind of misery.

Coltsblood has a history with those kinds of leads: the lugubrious slow-mo shred that is equal parts Finnish crawling death metal and Evoken-esque funeral doom. Hell, the three-piece spelled out its MO with the title of its sophomore release, 2017’s Ascending into Shimmering Darkness, a funeral sludge album that had a lot going on underneath the surface. “We all listen to a huge array of bands and styles, so we find a lot of unusual elements that come to bear during writing,” vocalist and bassist John McNulty said to Heavy Music HQ during Ascending into Shimmering Darkness‘s press cycle. “When we originally started writing, our main influences were Autopsy, Cathedral, Celtic Frost, Evoken, Acid King, and Darkthrone, to name a few.”

Coltsblood leveled up by getting down and dirty shimmeringly on its 2019 split with Un, one of the finest funeral sludge splits of the last few years, and not just because I can’t think of many others. (Per Encyclopaedia Metallum, since 2019, there have been 60 splits with at least one side occupied by a funeral doom band. There are 36 bands in the Archives tagged as “funeral” and “sludge,” including Un, along with bands like Aldebaran, Hellish Form, and Wreck of the Hesperus. Both things are a thing.) “Snows of the Winter Realm,” Coltblood’s 21-minute contribution, balances its funeral dirge with a sizable rock of resin-black sludge, finding this unhappy medium between gloriously depressive downers and churning miasma. In other words, it pulls off that classic funeral sludge trick of feeling great despite the claustrophobically crushing melancholy. “Together we dance until the end of time,” vocalist/bassist/keyboardist John McNulty roars during the song’s finale, and who wouldn’t sign up for that kind of sorrow?

Obscured into Nebulous Dusk doesn’t quite hit those same sorrowful highs, or sorrowful lows if we’re keeping the subterranean leads metaphor going — that’s fine because “Snows of the Winter Realm” is a career highlight. But the six-years-on follow-up album does showcase Coltsblood’s best qualities. For one, it’s the trio’s best-sounding album. Chris Fielding (Conan) was once again behind the boards for the recording and mixing, and Greg Chandler (Esoteric, Lychgate) returned to handle the mastering duties. However, everything feels extra enlarged this time around. Even through headphones, you can feel the bass and drummer Jay Plested’s powerful kicks and snare snaps, a phantom thump that reverberates off the sternum. That sonic depth keeps Obscured into Nebulous Dusk interesting even when it gets languid.

Right, as often as the leads are a warm bath you never want to leave, the elongated trudges can wear you down. The faster portion of “Waning of the Wolf Moon” is a literal blast, giving the album a shot in the arm. Unfortunately, it’s followed by an overlong section of harmonic feedback that nestles into its intertness. This is Obscured into Nebulous Dusk‘s push and pull: flurries of activity and movement-halting slowdowns. Yes, cast in a different light, those slowdowns can be moments of reflection and introspection; I think every listener gets something different from staring into a pool of still water. But a touch more dynamism would go a long way in keeping your eyelids open.

While “Waning of the Wolf Moon” is Obscured into Nebulous Dusk‘s best track, the title track is perhaps its most emblematic. Accentuated by a Skepticism-esque church organ, the creeping crawler’s massiveness and titanic density can’t be denied. That said, you really have to be on the same wavelength for it to penetrate one’s active listening consciousness. If relegated to the background, it’s content to stay there. Then again, those leads pierce the dusk, a hanging, lachrymose melody that never fails to draw your attention, helping the rest of the song envelope you. In other words, you live in that moment. Post-listen reflections may relegate Obscured into Nebulous Dusk to the second tier, but hearing those leads in the here and now? Like what it must be like to see a quicksilver stream, it’s hard to take your ears off of them.