ninehertz

They may not have been too well known, but my impression was that if you did know Leechfeast, you liked them, with a strong chance you loved them. It was sludge and hardcore, but unpredictable and inventive music, and their end was met with sadness. Forged Relics is the return of a member or members of the band, in a totally new guise, funeral doom on the exemplary Rope or Guillotine.

What becomes clear, over the course of three tracks and 37 minutes, is that they have seemingly given themselves a remit to take funeral doom to its logical end point. The experience of Portal is as much chamber music as it is funeral doom, often devolving into drone as a natural state of being. The first song, Borrowed Forms (Eternal Sea) sets an almost literal funeral tone with organs, a surprise on first hearing. Even in retrospect, on repeat plays, when you then know the only instrumentation on the album is through organ, piano, drums and vocals, it still feels singularly atypical. You can easily experience this is a doom summoning, a ritual; the whole thing feels like a ceremonial backdrop, sat in their pews, head bowed and penitent to the doom world.

The title track follows, a piano playing primarily alone, slow and full of sorrow. There are the faintest noises appearing in the background acting to disorientate, adding to the eeriness of the piece. A little vigour arrives by the seventh minute, the keys played louder and those backing sounds becoming clearer, perhaps the off key scratching of violin strings at a guess. I don't know what this album is doing to me, right down to the fact I've just sat down and taken in a ten minute long piano track and felt totally invested.

Catacombs for the Broken Stars (Eternal Desert) closes, drone through the pairing of rumbling low end vocals and the pipes, and it works - this blackened veil upon majestic organ congregating into something more than either the doom drone we know or even chamber music, manifesting a feeling of the supernatural that pervades in the spaces, a sensation only furthered by the guest vocals of Solveig Roseth. It's undeniably beautiful in these moments, an unexpected but unarguable admission.

Leechfeast always wanted to innovate, never content with the standards of doom, there's a kinship here with the likes of Neptunian Maximalism, particularly in their drone guises. That restless pursuit of progress and discovery has clearly not left them, it is if anything enhanced - to the point they've applied that innate exploration to funeral doom, stripping it down to the fundamental aspects and accentuating each of them, creating something that will produce unexpected kinship and emotional responses from even hardened doom souls.