REVIEW: Tumanduumband - Hail Satan, Triumph Awaits

Hail Satan, Triumph Awaits! It's a fitting title for Tumanduumband's second full-length, self-released today. With horror movie samples littered throughout and crushing doom metal riffs, it's a dark, unsettling listening experience. Spinning this album must be a bit like having a bad trip while Electric Wizard and cult classics play in the background, very, very slowly. The Stourbridge-based doom duo released Throne of Grief shortly before Halloween 2023, backed up by a busy touring schedule in the UK where Luke and Scott delivered, and continue to deliver, a simple but effective cocktail of bass, drums, riffs, fuzz, skulls, blood and Satan to whichever venue that has the stones to let them through their doors. With no vocals, no guitars, no solos, and no fucking about, their core aim of bringing doom down to its simplest, most skull-caving, most fundamental form has remained true, and Hail Satan, Triumph Awaits very much carries on down that path. Bigger, scarier, and longer, it's worth sitting down for...

With three songs drawn out over 36 minutes, the most immediate and obvious evolution for Tumanduumband is that their songs on Hail Satan, Triumph Awaits are much, much longer than before. Gone are the loosely verse-chorus-verse structures of setlist classics Thou Shall Burn or Dread Lord in favour of expansive, exploratory jams and even more focus on atmosphere, soundscaping, and creating a real sense of dread. In trying out more extended songs, pushing the compositions, and doing something different than before, you get the impression that Tumanduumband are realising amongst themselves just what they're capable of, and what potential they might have as an outfit. The nightmarish title track batters at the eardrums for eighteen and a half minutes. Throne of Grief had a couple of longer songs and plenty of dark aura, but this is a real leap forward in that direction.

Consulting The Haruspex starts the record with a soft, mournful chord sequence and a lumbering drum groove. The note choices are interesting, and avoid cliches of the genre. For a couple of minutes, it builds up brick by brick before finally turning up to 11. Amid a hellish wall of sound, swirling psychedelic effects, layered in with deliberation by the producer, really create an atmosphere. The deranged cacophony of riffs and noise goes on until around the ten-minute mark, when the final bass guitar rings out for over thirty seconds to bring the song to its pinnacle, as a sea of feedback, reverb and delay washes into your ears. So, the scene is set - it certainly dooms, but it's got a genuinely trippy aspect to it as well.

Alive in Death, the pre-release single (at "only" seven minutes long), kicks off with a killer Sleep-inspired stoner doom riff that they allow to breathe and grow for a few minutes. A short interlude pulls in a horrifyingly tense second riff, reduced to the speed of a crawl, as the song's centrepiece, before the main riff comes back. In essence, it's only a couple of riffs, but the measured approach to sampling and additional effects sets it out and elevates it far beyond its core components. Tumanduumband demand with the mood of the song that you pay attention and sink into whatever void-like, infernal landscape they've conjured up.

The title track then makes its entrance, presumably in a similar way to the figure in black that stood before Geezer Butler, who'd eventually inspire Black Sabbath's self-titled song. With shimmering, crescendoing effects that ebb and flow, paired with an ominous knocking door, it's a prime example of what stretched-out songs make Tumanduumband capable of, and just how scary they can be. The intro bubbles away for almost four and a half minutes. The power of Scott's nasty bass tone, dripping in pure sonic venom, is pushed to the front before the drop finally kicks in, showing how massive the two of them can sound. There are some adjacent bands out there with horror-inspired or "scary" lyrics that just feel gimmicky, as if a head-bobbing stoner rock riff is really going to terrify the listener. In this band, the fear factor has always felt like a core part of their identity, and it's realised like never before here.

The song grinds away from section to section, with interludes giving the song breathing space, knowing that the noisy heaviness will always resurface with vengeance. Sometimes the drums drop out for dramatic effect - sometimes they pound away at the back. The peaks and valleys over the long runtime keep the song alive and growing. The longer it goes on, the more all-encompassing it gets. The more riffs that play, the more the auditory experience drowns you. It gets real sloooooow right at the end, making a devastatingly punishing statement before it cuts away. By the time the song ends and you're left contemplating your life choices in silence, it's like waking up back into the real world from a nightmare. Of course, this really won't be for everyone, but that's what makes it stronger. Tumanduumband aren't asking or pleading with you to come back with catchy vocal hooks - they command a presence that draws you in, intrigues, and coughs you back out.

Compared to last time, Zegaphon's production is a bit crisper. It still sounds suffocatingly heavy, with a lo-fi ethos, with each addition and omission carefully considered. But this time round, it's closer to what you might expect from a psychedelic doom metal album, inviting more repeated listens.

Triumph doesn't so much await on this album. This is triumph, realised. Hail.

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MN