DARK CASTLE PLUMB THE DEPTHS OF NOTHING PARTICULARLY INTERESTING ON SURRENDER TO ALL LIFE BEYOND FORM
Like I (and many others) have said before, drone doom, like grind, is incredibly easy to make and almost impossible to make well. But unlike grind, its success lies not in its riffs or intensity, but in its overall atmosphere. People don’t like drone-doom because it’s slow (well, unless they’re insufferable people); they like it because it’s menacing, ominous, and full of intensifying-yet-rarely-resolved dread. Which, fortunately, means it’s easy to weed out genuine dronesmiths from the scores of assholes-with-amp-boners. There’s nothing quite like the toxic air great drone-doom summons, and inversely, there’s nothing quite as unbearable as vapid, pretentious, assfaced hipsters thinking they’re conjuring evil when all they’re doing is contributing to a trust fund-financed circle jerk because metal is the cool thing to nod to when your Deerhoof vinyl is backordered. Profound Lore’s Dark Castle don’t sit firmly on the latter end of that spectrum, but they don’t really sit at the former, either. There are some decent songs, some great ideas, but ultimately, not a whole lot to grab on to.
Not that their latest, Surrender to All Life Beyond Form doesn’t start off like a fucking beast, though. The opener (and title track) barges in like the gargantuan child of Godflesh and Today is the Day, alternating back-and-forth between nauseated open chords, shredded-throat bellowing, and mechanical drums that keep a steady backbeat via lumbering bashing and blastbeats. It’s followed by “Stare Into Absence,” which starts out with another wobbly arpeggio, then tumbles into some (admittedly inspired) drone-doom stomping. From there, though, the album gets spotty. There are interesting interludes (the eerie chords of “Create an Impulse,” the Trent Reznor-aping “To Hide is to Die”) and lousy ones (“Spirit Ritual,” or three minutes of mystical cat noises) interjected between standard drone-doom. The album’s closer — the seasick “Learning to Unlearn” — is almost too unsettling for its own good. If you’re keeping count, a third of Dark Castle’s nine songs (in thirty-three minutes) are interludes. Of the remaining songs, two or three are pretty-good-to-excellent. That’s a little too thin.
Granted, you have to pat them on the back for recognizing that listeners don’t always want an hour-plus of this sort of thing. But Surrender to All Life Beyond Form is too brief and formless to truly make an impact. Which is a shame, considering there are good ideas tucked in under the padding. So while they don’t bathe in the genre’s masturbatory excesses, one is left pining for a good album, even if the resulting one doesn’t go off the rails like it very well could have. It’s not vapid per se, but what, exactly, is the point? Perhaps that sometimes it’s better to make a killer EP than a confoundingly slim LP.
(2 out of 5 horns)
-SO
