ninehertz

We've featured a plethora of psych and doom from the South American continent over the two decades and more of ninehertz, but I don't recall too many acts from Columbia, so Dungeon are especially exciting to find. It is a daunting proposition with six tracks each lasting longer than ten minutes - its a gargantuan record, which ultimately proves fitting for the sound.

This is a record of the rawest end of doom, corrosive and decaying. At times it croaks and creaks at its edges so much it feels like it is lapsing into the battlegrounds of black metal or even war metal. The first track, Oroburos, sounds so encumbered by its weight, its thick tone, it appears to be collapsing in on itself, an explosive force akin to a power plant cooling tower's controlled crumbling destruction. It shuffles along, with a deliberately raw production, whirring guitars and a repetition that'll more likely make you question your sanity than drive you into a psychedelic trance. It is so rough but they have got something going here in that unrelenting cycle of a riff, the croaking vocals the only apt voice you could imagine amid this cyclone of doomy noise.

The shambolic, scattered and scarred pure sound is where the war metal comparison is apt, but applied to a slow, shuffling trawl of doom, which makes for this all encompassing sensation of trapped beneath a pollution of dread filled air. Even when a cool, almost flamboyant stoner rock riff appears, it is so enshrouded and buried in the murk you can barely hear it. And for all this, as it ends, the overriding sensation is that it was all a glorious racket of noise.

From there on, there is a welcome, if subtle variance. The majority of the remaining tracks are more consistently doom natured, although occasionally with a Bathory-era black metal vibe. There is naturally a chaotic punk bar fight mood to the whole affair, even when the guitar tone take on a more familiar rich fuzziness. And as its always no more than a minute or two away from becoming unhinged, even the more regular elements have you at a state of unease as to what may appear next.

Oddly, the purer doom it goes, the calmer it gets and the more I pine for the mania of the opening track - Manifestación for example turns from a noise intro to glorious Sabbath track, but despite this, with the frenzied fog cleared, it does leave those rougher edges a little exposed. It ends strongly, and differently again, with Apócrifo, a sharp and eerie trawl through squalid waters, before a spritely doom riff breaks free somewhat, but restrained in relation to what has gone before, variance in amongst the noise blitz that precedes it.

There's a real sense that this is a band lost in the own world, in their own heads - evident in how there's no real reason why some of these songs last so long, it's not like they evolve in stages. And yet it is a thrill to witness this smog of wild noises, as it buzzes away in your skull.