Diaries of Doom

Tumanduumband's third release dropped out of nowhere at the end of January. A testament to the lads' will to keep the ball rolling over lockdown, as it has been recorded at home on smartphones, it proves that little will stop this four-legged beast. It also signals a change in direction and sound - the instrumental drum and bass doom riffs are replaced with sludgy, droney, blackened evil performed with guitars and vocals instead. So, fair play for keeping things going, and fresh, given all the shit going on in the world at the moment. The title track is a droning slow burner, with Luke's tortured howls creating a genuinely unsettling vibe. It weaves in and out of different sections with a free flowing structure. More than anything, the focus is upon atmosphere and a different kind of evil that the duo's last two releases have been based around. The very raw production ethic works well here. As much as this choice has come out of necessity, with a national lockdown in fo...

Noise terror trio Catafalque are here to disturb you. Their oscillations are fear. Following on from 2020 album Corpses , which saw four original tracks from the troupe and an collection of remixes of the same tracks, it might be easy to suggest that they’re starting to scrape the bottom of the HARSH NOISE DRONE DOOM METAL barrel. Fortunately, with We Will Always Suffer,  they’re exploring new avenues of sonic torture, and the album is all the better for it.   Catafalque are able to cohesively weave through multiple avenues of electronic music creation. Opening track ‘Enjoy the Violence’ stacks reverberant bells against feedback-laden, metal scraping noise, whilst ‘You Are the Only One Here’ presents itself as a total inversion of what a psychedelic doom track might achieve. In place of swirling guitars that get tripped out in delay and reverb, the track has a lo-fi drum recording washed into a tower of noise and feedback, with harrowing shrieks for vocals. ‘Spectral’, a parti...

Any artist proclaiming themselves as ‘HARSH NOISE DRONE DOOM METAL’ is bound to cause eyes to roll and heads to turn in equal measure; a true musical Marmite. Heavily littered throughout each of the genres listed in Catafalque’s self-descriptor are acts that manage to churn out song after song of uninspired tunes without any real identity save for defining themselves against the sounds of other acts. Not so with Catafalque. Hearts and inspirations on their sleeves? Definitely. But the bleak hopelessness conjured by Dolby, Ozers, and Shepard unmistakably charts them amongst the brightest (or in this case, bleakest) in their constellation.  ‘Sepulcre’, the first single released in anticipation of new album We Will Always Suffer (26th June 2020) continues the Catafalque tradition of lamenting drones and towering textures. Anchoring the ear on this tune however, as opposed to previous solo machinations, is a repeating drum beat that lies somewhere between heavy hip hop and industrial i...