At last, another full length from Kentucky’s lead weight blackened doom sludge mystery Highgate. It’s been three years since their Shrines To The Warhead album with only a compilation of older stuff and a split with Ghast in between (which of course I missed…) so I was intrigued as to what might have shifted in their sound. I won’t say ‘eager’ because previously Highgate have ground out such a dark sound I’m not sure that you can do anything other than crawl out alive…
Three songs, a little under fifty minutes.
Mother Abyss. Now there’s an opening title. Twelve minutes of darkness with a dripping, rattling cavern before a thick, sludge edged doom riff pushes out. The vocals are tortured, stretched and raw mangled sounds, something trapped between drums and riff. It builds to a crest and then by Highgate’s standards tottered over into a chaotic whirl of frantic drums and circling riffs that pound at the walls as the Abyss no doubt returns their stare. A rather fine start indeed.
Second song ‘There Will Never Be Light Again’ has a slightly more open, less intense sound at least in the beginning. Almost… stoner in the beginning with a deceptively gentle sound, though the strangled, belligerent vocals return and make sure this is far from comfortable. The riff is slow, hypnotic, downbeat but subtle, dragging the tatters of emotion with it. The surprise for me is that somewhere assertions the nine minute mark there is a subtle but distinct shift in the sound. Some of even this lesser weight seems to fall away, just a touch, and those doom melody lines come through even stronger. It is a bit off a departure for Highgate, a twist in their sound but it comes across strong, strident and gathers speed and a strangely bleak atmosphere well, suggesting crepuscular, tainted failing light but light nonetheless. And between the other two tracks it works, too. Cool.
Nachwirkungen/Survival is the end-piece; slow sludgy doom, phlegm caked vocals rattling in the darkness of the mood. The kind of doom that reminds me of the old Warehouse album As Heaven Turns To Ash. Crushing, deliberate and with a weight in the belly of the riff that has you crawling across a desolate floor in am abandoned city where the iron rods, rusted and twisted, crack the diseased concrete. Not a spark off hope, of light, for twenty minutes of despair. Guitars find lines that leech from Joy Division and proto goth, crush it through the doom and let the bleak soundscape seep into the basement to congeal into a breath taker off a song that is just about the finest thing Highgate have conjured. A truly superb, mesmeric end to an outstanding effort.
(8/10 Gizmo)
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