ninehertz

Holy Tumour has a lot to live up to. Runtuh’s last album Ambiguous Man was described as a masterpiece here when we played one of its tracks on our podcast a couple of years back. The Malaysian quartet are at the extreme ends of doom, and few find the depths of sheer abject misanthropy and nihilism as they reach.

This is a band exploring the sonically deplorable limits of these extremes. The album has two threads running through it, four tracks of “abstract improvisation” and three of the more expected decomposed sludge.

The former are a whirlpool of odd noises, downer samples and the skeleton of doom instrumentation. Three of them are naturally the shortest tracks on the album, but the fourth, Prey is the longest of all. It has no movement, just random noises, a cymbal, cosmic synths, guitars warming up but all in the background. Vocals enter and it almost turns to a song proper, a chanting, hell-grunting mess bringing the instruments with it, utter darkness cast. It is, at nearly ten minutes, an ordeal, an industrial tinged nightmare.

Sanctimonious is the first of the more traditional (if that word can be used for such turgid horrorscapes) tracks, an unholy doom rumbling noise cast by a storm cloud of guitars and percussion that darkens your mood immediately. The vocals cry out as if under incredible stress, reminiscent of the all-encompassing walls of misery that the likes of Indian and Lord Mantis erect.

On Unsolicited, threat hangs in the atmosphere like droplets, as the sludge mire struggles to even move forward such is its bulk. As it generates momentum it brings something akin to the venom of Moloch, before it becomes an unstoppable rolling rumble as whatever was holding it back snaps, turning it into an almost grind like weapon. Not for the first time, they tip over into the harrowed worlds of black metal on the closing Famine, a draining, unrelenting repetition as its hanging notes drag on.

Holy Tumour is a difficult listen for two reasons – the change in styles and the freeform angular noise tracks make for a jarring experience as you traverse the album, and simply the oppressiveness of the barrage of ugly noises. The former is a reflection of the band’s restless experimentalism, willing to sacrifice an album’s purity to move in new directions. The latter is why we’re all here in the first place and is delivered just as your self-loathing always desired.