Review Summary: Adrift in majestic funeral doom/death bliss.
Ark is nothing less than colossal in every way, shape, and form. The Slow Death’s brand of funeral doom meets death metal is massive in the engulfing nature of its atmosphere, the surprisingly thick glaze of guitar and piano melody, and the concrete thick low end riffs underneath everything else. The band certainly succeeds in achieving a thick sound, because by god this is
dense. If anything, the album art just reinforces this feeling, with the depiction of space adding to the feeling of deep, suffocating density. In simple terms,
Ark is quite a journey. A journey filled with majestic crescendos and cavernous atmospherics that sticks to the back of the mind and refuses to leave.
While it’s nothing new for doom metal, and especially funeral doom, the album is quite a long listen, clocking in at over seventy minutes of material. Only one track is less than ten minutes, an interlude just under the three minute mark, and the longest almost reaches twenty. Surprisingly, it moves faster than one would expect.
Ark is filled with subtle twists and turns within the larger pieces that keep them dynamic and rewarding. The clean, soft guitars in “The Chosen Ones” and the guitar solo in “Severance” are perfect examples of this. Despite being labeled as doom and death metal, heaviness isn’t really key to what makes the album work. In fact the riffs don’t really take the driver’s seat all that often. They’re certainly present, with perfectly foreboding passages, but melody reigns more often by a fair margin. Guitar leads weave a tapestry of beauty across the top, with piano and synth medleys coming in to provide an interesting interplay quite often. By far one of the most impressive aspects of
Ark is the wonderful vocal contrast. On the one hand, The Slow Death offers up these guttural furnace bellows esque death metal vocals that work oddly well whether it’s over doom riffing or a melodic passage. In answer to this extremity, the band slips in soaring female clean singing to counter it from an opposite viewpoint. The changeups between the two are fantastic enough, but it isn’t until the two miraculously join that The Slow Death really turn heads.
It’s clear that the runtime will be the greatest barrier for newcomers, but The Slow Death’s sense of flow will serve to keep those who dare quite interested.
Ark is a behemoth that ebbs along leisurely, but surely towards its goal. It’s a dark, chilling, gorgeous work that should be on any metalhead’s 2015 playlist. After this, it’s hard to deny that whatever The Slow Death were shooting for, well, they hit the mark.
