ninehertz

Bear with me while I recount a recent anecdote – the local city-wide fringe music festival in my town is around the corner and I’m checking out the multitude of line ups, noticeably short on metal this year. Until someone tells me there’s an Australian doom band called Whitehorse inexplicably playing an indie all-dayer. I look into it, excited; alas, it is another band of the same name. Two days later, the promo for this split release arrives. Call it fate. Then the more I read into this true Whitehorse, the more it sounds perfect for my musical tastes. Call it destiny.

And if you think that’s a bit much, a bit overly dramatic for an intro then… yeah, fair enough. But I do love this, so let’s get to business. Two long tracks from Whitehorse supplemented by five from noise artist Uboa, more of whom to come.

Whitehorse make an immediately favourable impression on Wringing Life. Croaky vocals and minimal instruments, driven by drums and simple guitar notes – this is blackened-sky doom excellence, sixteen minutes of terror driven by the shadows, static noise slowly building, like witnessing your own encasement beneath dirt but unable to move to resist. It is a wonderful exercise in doom’s inverse relation between momentum and threat, its restraint the primary culprit in curating this morbid atmosphere. Whisper it because it doesn’t seem to be the right expression for the mood, but it is gorgeous sounding, the whole thing feels like an event I started a few hours ago and am still bewitched by as it finally ends.

The Wait has a thicker sound, but the same basic approach – instruments walking not charging, building in menace, the vocals a death metal gurgle from below the ground. It isn’t as spine-chillingly special as the opener, but it’s still got an electricity to it you can feel across your body.

That’s a difficult act to follow for Uboa. Especially so because, being honest, my love for and breadth of knowledge of noise (or even “death industrial” as they have it) is limited. I’ve enjoyed noise sets live but little in the ways of frame of reference to compare this to, so going more on feel in this review.

The early couple of tracks are loud and abrasive as imagined, crunching noises like the deployment of planet-destroying machinery in the first, static infused solar winds whipping by and screeches from those clouds in the second. Then it changes up on Dreamwalker, Fuck I Miss You – ambient piano and voice, it’s… nice? There’s gentle vocals again on Pareidolia Shadow, lulling you into an industrial architecture that feels like it is being erected around you as you listen. And then it all ends with The Apocalypse of True Love, less aggressive than you’d imagine for noise, instead progressive and warming, a showcase of synth led experimentalism.

One I read into them, I had high expectations for Whitehorse. They more than exceeded them, they blew them away. This (Wringing Life in particular) is how I want doom to sound. More of a surprise is how much I got out of the Uboa tracks, which I assumed would be the lesser side of this split – absolutely none of that, it is a strangely emotive, beautifully crafted piece of art. I loved the whole release.