ninehertz

From listening to the much-missed Independent Music Podcast, and one episode featuring an Indonesian band I learnt that Bandung is a thriving metal city, so the location of this new band is of no surprise. Still, the impact of the self-proclaimed “monolithic doom garbage” offered by Tarnac makes a mighty impression.

This is essentially a three song, twenty-three minute demo of raw doom and sludge, creaking and crawling and overburdened with the thickest, sickest of tones. The vocals are bestial death grunts, against music often stripped back to its base levels – not through a lack of production or ability, but distinctly on purpose to accentuate its raw, blackened aura. There are hints of Electric Wizard in the guitar, but the vocals push it back towards sludge on every word.

Its natural lack of pace is a suffering, self-flagellating trait it happily wallows within. On Krematorium the vocals push it even further into the recesses of the extremes, nudging catacombic death-doom gloominess. The final track, The Unabomber, Explained is the length of the two prior tracks added together and Tarnac use this to go slower and doomier, the outcome sounding like a post-nuclear apocalypse landscape, practically in doom-drone terrain.

It's a nice change up to showcase that they’ve got more than one string to their bow as it holds that speaker rattling line for its full eleven plus minutes. Crime and Punishment is an excellent introduction to a band gorging in the desperate, desolate ends of doom.