Review Summary: Implode the Barren Abyss into Collapse.
It’s not a coincidence that the track titles make a perfectly coherent and tremendously crushing sentence with just a couple of extra words. Everything about this album suggests that an incredible amount of time, attention, and effort was given to craft it into a cold, calculated, and yet vibrantly impassioned sonic experience for one purpose alone; to force your deepest, darkest thoughts and feelings to the surface.
Speaking of “crushing”, terms like that get thrown around a lot here at Sput, along with “massive”, “epic”, and “overwhelming” to name a few others. It’s no one’s fault. There’s only so many words (in English, or any other language) to describe how something makes us feel. I believe that the reason their number and scope is somewhat limited is specifically because the human condition is disarmingly similar from one person to the next. We have vastly different opinions and perceptions but when it comes down to it, the most base and raw emotions (anger, fear, compassion, courage, hope, despair, hate, love) tend to hit us all the same, regardless of who or what we feel those things towards, or because of.
It is this deep emotional core present within all of us that Slow aims directly for and, with their latest sprawling, downtuned, glacially paced offering, blast wide open in the Slowest of motion.
Implode opens with the rising feedbacked screech of a guitar and a chilling guttural roar, filling your eardrums and expanding outward across shockwaves of cymbal smashes and a riff so massive it seems to be vibrating and motionless at the same time. Higher-tone riffs and higher-still atmospheric synths layer over that and before you can fully grasp what’s happening, it all falls away to placid piano pangs and a sinister synth backdrop, only to then explode inside your head yet again. The nine-minute song, though played at typical funeral doom pace, strides onward to its conclusion with such a smooth and purposeful gait that it’s over before you can fully absorb what transpired.
Barren enters with strums that, while electrified, sound almost acoustic in tone and cadence. The vocals, really coming to the forefront with the second track, bend and rise and fall and move with the instrumentation to the point where you wouldn’t be able to determine which aspect was constructed first, and which one was following. The same is true of the organically implemented synth work, nearly always present but not overdone, never overtaking the soundscape but filling it out, floating amidst the gaps created by the splashing cymbals and undulating riffs. The production here is expertly done, allowing all the various sonic elements to breathe and flow while creating an awe-striking vastness that simultaneously closes in around you and stretches out forever.
Several solos feature, played much faster and more frantically than anything else going on. They create a chest-gripping sense of urgency and desperation, often followed not long after by a calming release of pressure which then builds back again, stronger than before. You begin to realize that the way each track and the album as a whole is constructed forms wall-like waves that rise and crash and fall away. With each successive battering, the hard, life-forged layers around your emotional core protecting you from falling prey to that short list of base ones begin to erode. By the time you reach Abyss, grander and more focused than what’s come before and perhaps the most crushing song on the album, you’re finding your breath labored, your mind reeling, and your soul trying to tell you that you need to escape, now, even though you’ve just been sitting there and nothing’s actually happening.
Collapse uses its longer runtime to slow things down and spread them out even more. As if witnessing the ground of the aural landscape created so far crumble around you, the riffs carry more pain, the synths more sorrow, the drums more anger, the vocals more despair. The waves are no longer walls by now but mountains, their outward edges and utmost pinnacles nigh imperceptible, pushed out of your peripheral amidst the swaying, smashing slosh subsuming you. It all ends with a brief but nonetheless epic flurry of double-pedal bass, blasts, soaring synths, and roaring riffs that fuse death with doom and close out this monumental masterpiece with an overwhelming sense of having everything you know and love stripped away from you, yet you are left alive to deal with the loss.
It's then that you might notice this album has a “I” in its title. There’s more to come on this journey, and Slow seeks to make it a truly unforgettable one.
