ninehertz

Cattle Hammer have being making noises in the underground of late and with good reason – fronted by Duncan Wilkins of Mistress (and Fukpig and once of Anaal Nathrakh), with a set of oppressive demos and a single 70 minute doom behemoth already out there, the time is ripe to unleash their debut album.

Even with hopes high, it exceeds them. This is a stunning exercise in doom nihilistic negativity. There are four tracks taking over three quarters of an hour, gorging on the excesses of doom and sludge. The tracks vary in attack formation too, so it isn’t one long dirge, another feather in its cap.

Firstly, there’s Gloomsower’s crunching, crushing goodness – the early riff knocking you back like running in a sludge congealed wave. The vocals are strained as if being strangled out of their throat, as the instruments hammer forth with such clanking heaviness, in Indian or Lord Mantis worlds of antagonistic chaos. There’s something of a sludge version of Ramesses’ Misanthropic Alchemy masterpiece that I hear too. It is simply awesome – I don’t want it to end, even after nearly ten minutes.

Can they maintain this? Somehow, yes, to the very last minute. The variance I mentioned is key – it is subtle of course, but anyone with an ear for the extreme excesses of doom will hear and appreciate it. Rotting’s guitars have the densest of tones and move in glacial movements, in similarity with the likes of Blind Monarch and Sea Bastard. The vocals are once again more akin to inhuman gargled incantations. Their doom is in the outer limits, every aspect stretch tested, every noise, every laboured strike of string or skin, pulled at, dissected and dirtied to create something so unholy and yet pure.

Watchmen, Alone is skin-crawlingly creepy, led by clanking noises, glitches and pained voices, even when the real terror of the instrumentation arrives it remains unsettling, an abominable cacophony. It is another angle on the same shade of blackness, as seen again on Body Puzzle which is haunted by the desolate souls of Burning Witch and Khanate, and every bit as affecting as those masters, a lesson in punishing restraint and discomfort for all of its thirteen minutes.

The brutality of it and more over its quality is deserving of such a deep dive review, so I’ll now keep this ending short, to allow it the emphasis it deserves – this is a simply incredible doom album.