Tuesday 21 March 2017

ALBUM REVIEW: Mountain God - "Bread Solstice"

By: Ben Fitts


Album Type: Full Length
Date Released: 24/03/2017
Label: Artificial Head Records




“Bread Solstice”, the debut full length from the Brooklyn based doom outfit Mountain God, sounds like a creature born in the depths of a hidden cavern. Wet reverb echoes through the album as if it were splashing off of cave walls and demented vocals wander through the mix like a whisper from the shadows.  “Bread Solstice” is filled subterranean rumbles of fat guitar tone, distant, tortured vocals and chilling aura. It is an album that roars like the echoes of a distant thunderstorm.       


“Bread Solstice” DD//LP track listing:

1).Scaling The Silver Step
2).Nazca Lines
3).Karmic Truth
4).Junglenaut
5).Unknown Ascent
6).Hymn To Nothing


The Review:

“Bread Solstice”, the debut full length from the Brooklyn based doom outfit Mountain God, sounds like a creature born in the depths of a hidden cavern. Wet reverb echoes through the album as if it were splashing off of cave walls and demented vocals wander through the mix like a whisper from the shadows. All the ambience results in a sort of looseness that causes “Bread Solstice” to be the sort of doom album that you feel in your head rather than your gut, but Mountain God prove that that is in no way has to be a bad thing. “Bread Solstice” is filled subterranean rumbles of fat guitar tone, distant, tortured vocals and chilling aura.

The album begins with a gradual fade in on its opening track, the shambling tempo, mostly instrumental “Scaling The Silver Steps”. Vocals make their first appearance on the album at over three minutes into “Scaling The Silver Steps”, and when they do, it is more like the dying hiss of a reptile than a human voice. “Nazca Lines”, the album’s longest track, (at eleven and a half minutes) follows. The track starts with a grimly melodic guitar passage, which is looped as the rest of the band creeps into the mournful clamour. The track unfolds and develops over its remaining nine minutes, but never breaks from the utter bleakness that defines its beginning. The lengthy study of dolefulness that is “Nazca Lines” is followed by the album’s hardest hitting track, the mid tempo, sludgy stomper “Karmic Truth”, creating a very effective contrast.

All the doomy, cavernous echoes to be found on the first three tracks of “Bread Solstice” might as well have been bone dry when compared to the album’s next two tracks, “Junglenaut” and “Unknown Ascent”. While “Junglenaut” has a backdrop of foaming guitar chugging under its beginning, both tracks are washed in so much reverb that they sound as if they are being performed on the top of some massive mountain far away, and the sounds you are hearing are echoes that drift to the valley below. I would imagine this was Mountain God’s exact intention.

The album closes on its second longest song and possible standout track, the nine minute long “Hymn To Nothing”. Beginning with a simplistic drum beat pounding through a haze of wind-like white noise, “Hymn To Nothing” then greets the listener with a frosty bass line that develops into a gargantuan riff once the guitars join. “Hymn To Nothing” is stylistically closer to classic doom metal than anything else to be found on “Bread Solstice” and its occasional breaks into clean sections only add to the intensity once the fuzzed out riffs return. Full of sinister pleasures, Bread Solstice roars like the echoes of a distant thunderstorm.      


“Bread Solstice” is available to preorder/buy here





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