ninehertz

There’s more than meets the eye to Denmark’s Goatsmoker. With a name you’d think surely must have been used before within doom, it’d be easy to think that the music that follows will be middle of the road, common garden variety of the genre. But they have much more to offer – doom yes, but with their own interesting take.

They talk of not focussing on genre conformity, instead looking for “resonance, atmosphere and the human pulse behind their sound” and this rings true across the five tracks. When it clicks, they create magical moments and even when it doesn’t, where it meanders a little, I’m still fully invested.

They construct and generate strangely haunted atmospheres on each track, songs that exist as vapours and intoxicated, shrouded movements. It is still doom in its primary state – this isn’t an ambient or noise drone record – but it equally doesn’t rest on the standard riff verse chorus routines. At times it has me thinking of Rwake when they’re in their most oblique, mystical and arcane realms.

It does sometimes lose focus as a result, but as I say, it never becomes boring, simply feels a little lost in its own clouds in these times. They tip into stoner rock here and there, and a Neurosis-style post-metal on more than one occasion. Waiting is perhaps the highlight, the ghostly airs finally giving up to stoner and doom in perfect union, although Entropy Reigns in Silence is also worthy of specific attention, as atmospheric doom, post-metal and a hint of the progressive metal of Dvne or Conjurer (just at the edges mind) coalesce.

There’s a real sense that while this is still primarily a doom record (from a band with the most obvious of doom names), Goatsmoker have carved out their own little niche on E.R.I.S., which is of course most welcome.