ninehertz

Owls Over Oaks are an Italian trio plying “extreme doom drone”. This is their debut and with the monochrome artwork of an owl in a graveyard, the gothic pastoral band name and promise of three gargantuan tracks across nearly 40 minutes there’s a lot of promise heading in.

This is mastered by James Plotkin, which is telling – his Khanate past serving as a template for a lot of what follows. The songs are named after the words of the band, so we begin with Owls and it makes an enormous impression. Think funeral doom, think of Thorr’s Hammer – this is morose, mournful and extremely effective. The guitar lands like a giant’s footsteps, laborious, far apart and causing the ground to rumble. A slight and melodic change provides a nice contrast, ticking away, the vocals grunt in the dark, its gradual momentum change only slight but significant, shuffling forth.

The tone is so harsh it could almost be industrial at times, so cold it is. Over has more of a ramshackle start with its unhinged guitars and deranged vocals; it has moved away from the funereal into some uncomforting drone pattern repeats and ramblings. Oaks is different again with its dull thud stomping guitars and ghostly vocals. Crazy bass sounds enter as do black metal shrieks, even ending on a brighter note with sung vocals.

This free-thinking variance is welcome, but the longer the album goes the output becomes a little hit and miss, an unfortunate but inevitable outcome of experimentalism. The album tails off incrementally song to song. But there is enough here, particularly on the opener to warrant investigation and investiture of your time into this vast, grand doom offering, and certainly intriguing to see where they go from here.