ninehertz

Seventeen songs, eh? Maybe they’ll all be short. First track – 9 minutes. Okay, let’s strap in.

Although, I shouldn’t be surprised. We have featured Sand Into Glass twice before, and listening back to our descriptions of them on our podcast we mention everything and everyone from blackened doom, Ufomammut, Meshuggah, psychedelic, prog, Conan… and an obvious statement of “hard to place”.

Sand Into Glass are a solo artist from Albuquerque, and Uncertain Oath is their latest bewildering ride, intended as one long song but chopped into 17 unequal pieces. It takes us on more angled journeys than ever before.

There are certain patterns at play, phases of different styles. Early on, there is the expected doom architecture (they have albums (plural) with wizards on the artwork previously after all) early on, but this diverts from where you might expect, and into almost industrial lands, the vocals too of a generation ago, and I’m sensing a clear image of Fudge Tunnel’s sounds. It is proggy here, noise-rock too.

There are clanging industrial noises pitted against metallic hardcore battering guitars, a workshop of rough noises in the same room. There are weirdo Ministry type industrial moments, and then a synth interlude which heralds a leftward shift again. From there you find Conan big riffs dominating whole tracks, sometimes existing purely on their own.

At times the compartmentalism of these passages into tracks is a little distracting – some songs exist as simply a cosmic noise and bleep, or a chunky riff alone, as if not complete ideas thrown into an already long album. But the oddness of the many varying elements never lets you settle on one thought for too long, good or bad. In the latter half of the album, you’ll find classic rock guitar wailing away, a gothic Paradise Lost closer, gruff doom vocals, even moments where it travels close to death metal.

There is so much going on. At its worst it feels like a spillage of all ideas from this solo artist’s brain on to record, but at its best an ever-intriguing smorgasbord of different styles toyed with and sat jarringly next to each other like a class of misfits. For every time it frustrates, there’s twice as many were you’ll marvel at the bold weirdness of it all, and the strong identity imprinted, and that makes it more than worth a visit.