ninehertz

Woah, this is some record. Matraque are from Minsk, reaching us via Lithuania's Ashen Tree Records, and they have created a monster, a doom record of such impact you can't help but become immersed in its density, a standard you'd expect from one of the leading lights of the heaviest end of doom.

There are only five tracks, but it's still nearly 40 minutes long, with a mid-section interlude too. This is doom at the far end of the scale in terms of bleakness and weight, stated influences from the unholy likes of Meth Drinker and Grief. The opening song, Kola, provides an early reminder of Primitive Man's nihilist approach to doom, the guitars that shriek out from the gloom, sparks of distortion. This is oppressive stuff, effectively so - and not all plod slow either, but always suffocating, edging towards pure funeral doom the longer it goes. It finally crumples under its own weight well before the end, an ambient, indistinguishable radio-static voice and distant bird song in the eerie void.

It barely relents (even the interlude is ambient but unsettling noise). Pustazelle's big riff opening goes so far into the darkness it's verging on death metal in the tight instrumentation and black metal in the vocals and sheer mania of it. You can hear touches of everything from Plebeian Grandstand to Portal in here, but by its ending, as the vocals become rabid shouts of pain and fear, it transforms into a state of aural terror, a visceral nightmare sound.

Volya crawls in, echoes of the great Indian, the way even in considered build up phases they can still sound threatening, the product of the atmosphere of the instruments and the inhuman vocals. The closing Pry`py`nak is four minutes of pure atmospherics, a nod to two other listed influences The Body and Bismuth, the vague industrial elements allied to doom from the former, the use of space of the latter.

Coltsblood's long awaited new album comes out at the end of the month - if you can't wait until then for your fix on gigantic sounding, suffocatingly dark doom, then get your ears in here. This is an incredibly strong album, start to finish, the product of its influences but then more than that, creating something new from there to be truly individual and earn its own space at the top table amongst their peers.