Slomatics – Atomicult Review

[Artwork by Ryan Lesser]

It starts softly. “Obey Capricorn,” the opener of Slomatics’ eighth album, Atomicult, begins with drummer/vocalist Martin Harvey all by his lonesome. “Behold: the moon, the sun, the stars, the sky,” Harvey sings with comparatively soaring cleans that bands in the sludge doom domain don’t typically employ. But, and this is key, they’re not completely clean: there’s an effect on Harvey’s voice, one which seems to suppress the clarity, like the ghostly audio residue left on a tape that hasn’t been thoroughly scrubbed. The effect compacts the normally strong vocals into something soft, quiet, hushed; a voice far off in the distance. Subsequently, if you’re already familiar with the downtuned sonic boom of the 21-year-old Belfast, Ireland trio, you might figure that low level is a new mixing choice, so you turn the volume up. That’s precisely what Slomatics wants you to do. Bang. The sky tears in two. Behold: the rumble, the thunder, the roar, the riff. The riff clobbers you. It’s like getting sucker-punched by an avalanche, like getting ambushed by the first wave of a tsunami. You’re ragdolled within the twin-guitar thrum; tossed around, up is down, down is up. All is riff, the devastating distortion and the whump of thumping drums. Atomicult passes the loudness test with the ease of a professional rally car driver at the DMV looking to upgrade their learner’s permit. However, Atomicult struggles with the quiet test.

The loud/quiet test? Welcome to the weeds. The loud/quiet test is, perhaps, too inside baseball for a sludge doom write-up, albeit a sludge doom album that is a bit brainier and more sci-fi-minded than most. That is to say, in light of the riff worship on display, this isn’t a test you need to embrace, consider, or care about. Given how well-known the contours of the style are, if you’re down with sludge doom, you’ll either like Atomicult right from the jump, or you can use certain smokable substances to increase the likelihood of successfully jump-starting the liking. (It’s probably worth mentioning that your reviewer has been fully sober for 10 years, so, when it comes to a sludge doom review, this is like asking a nun to direct a porno. I get it.) Summation: Slomatics knows what it’s doing, and it does it well. You’ll either vibe with that or not.

Now, with that out of the way, if you don’t mind digging into Atomicult with the tenacity of a graverobber, know that the loud/quiet test isn’t a holdover from when major labels were trying to sign bands that sounded like The Pixies, but a valuable tool in the music writer’s toolbox. It goes like this: First, you play the album loudly, and then you play it quietly. Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Look, no music writer is going to win a National Medal of Science; we’re all surprised that any of us can even remember to turn the computer on before we start typing. Yes, the test is more bereft of genius than two Mortician riffs that have been transmogrified into human form so they may be pitted in a competitive lobotomy contest. But the stupid simplicity is kind of the point because the test is trying to get down to something embryonic about the music. You’re looking for different things in each sub-test. Loud: You turn up the volume to acquire a feel for an album’s visceral impact and sonic density, exploring its verticality in terms of layering. Quiet: You turn the volume down to examine its horizontal flow and whether the songwriting, specifically the hooks, are strong enough to carry the songs. Thus, the loud/quiet test is particularly useful in metal, a style that, for the most part, lives its life in the loud. To get the whole picture, then, you do the opposite, playing an album at a whisper, to understand what else is there.

Atomicult contains a lot there when it’s loud. Riffsmiths David Majury and Christopher Couzens carve monolithic columns out of mountains, these load-bearing grooves that prop up everything else Slomatics tries to accomplish. When the band adds synths, these spacey strobes and clouds of tones, the gravitational pull of the riffs keeps everything intact. And when you key into those riffs, you almost feel like you’re at the center of the universe, watching other elements spin around you, be it Harvey’s singing and drumming or the other adornments that keep these songs from just being Will It Chug? exercises.

Right, in terms of sheer sonic data, Atomicult almost reminds me more of the infinite-onion approach of a shoegaze album. You could spend the entire runtime exploring its atmospheric layers and come away feeling satisfied. But, since this is a riff-first album, nothing feels overly smeary. You don’t feel lost or untethered, floating around aimlessly within the sonic soup, because the riffs are there to recenter you. And that is especially important when Slomatics does clever stuff. For a band so happy to engage in the lizard-brain-tickling thud of a sludge doom riff, these three sure don’t mind blasting off into headier spaces, such as the prog-curious “Physical Witching,” which goes full synth attack complete with a Vangelis-ass vocal patch. It’s at those moments that Slomatics sounds like Floor got a graduate degree in creative writing and spent its entire tenure listening to Van der Graaf Generator.

Ah, but then you turn Atomicult down to the same volume as a mouse’s squeak, and you start hearing the structural songwriting weak points, the reasons why this album may not fully connect and keep your attention. First, most obviously, no other riff challenges for the Atomicult crown than that first one in “Obey Capricorn.” The rest of the grooves are continually eroded by increasing familiarity until, by the outro of “To Ultramegaphonium,” those monolithic columns are reduced to sand that slips through your fingers. That wouldn’t be a problem if the songs could refresh those riffs with a more dynamic rise and fall, but Slomatics is anchored to the same general midpace tempo throughout. You’re just begging for something quicker, like how drummer Chris Hakius kept Sleep’s “Dopesmoker” fresh by launching into those double-time sprints that sounded like a stampede of camels.

That lack of tempo variation diminishes the individuality of these songs. Without it, they’re more like movements of an oddly static 40-odd-minute suite. Like, it would be tough to extract these tracks for a mixtape and have them stand alone without them crying out for their compatriots. And, once more, that wouldn’t be a problem if Atomicult‘s whole felt like it was going somewhere. Instead, it’s akin to running an ultramarathon on a track or hiking within the stairwell of a skyscraper. The body aches, but there’s no thrust, no forward momentum, no sense of distance traveled. Atomicult doesn’t rush like a river; it’s a floating leaf caught in an eddy. When Slomatics does switch things up, such as on the genuinely pretty space rock-y ballad “Relics,” it’s more in terms of timbre and perceived loudness. “Relics” still plods along at the same speed with Harvey utilizing the same vocal rhythm, and the best hook of the album, a serene legato string melody that plays well against the strumming guitars, doesn’t have the juice to reset the mounting fatigue.

And yet, if you turn the volume dial to 11, “Relics” suddenly becomes immersive and engaging. You hear all of the minute points of interest, these pinpricks of light that sparkle like a starry sky free of light pollution. When the storm clouds roll back in on “Night Grief,” “Relics” has ably set the stage for the earned crunch of that first wall-shaking chug. It’s then that you realize Atomicult has many pleasures, but they all exist on the y-axis. The album starts softly, but it does its best work when it’s loud. So crank it.