ninehertz

Hey, look at us, aren’t we clever, we can write these amazing songs with the catchiest of hooks and could really go somewhere…fuck you, we’re playing black metal mid-set of your gig for no reason, writhing around on the floor whilst doing so, and now we’re gonna submit a seventeen-minute track to this new split…

Well right back at you, because I’m doom (a genre you took me away from when I had to pick your Mysteries album as my best of 2024) and I’m therefore well accustomed to such lengths. Welcome to Pohl, a band that deny the easy path to being great thus making them all the greater. The contribute Flayed Lord Prayer to this new split, where a thunder and gentle noise opening takes the first few minutes before settling into their difficult to pigeon-hole sound of fragmented noise-rock, post-hardcore and maybe even stoner, doom, indie and who knows what else. It is all filtered through a warped psychedelic gauze, the familiar crescendo choruses present, unaccustomed wind instruments arriving and ushering in the true chorus which is nothing short of euphoric. There’s still time for a big doom blow out providing the ending it deserves, a glorious time that felt both lasting forever and over in no time simultaneously.

It would be easy to be overshadowed by such bravado and glory, but Ogives Big Band are up to the task and hold their own on the flipside. They go with a much more conventional four tracks in their allotted time, but their music is anything but. There’s a commonality with their split partners in the noise-rock and agitated post-hardcore base, with soaring vocals that could be from stoner rock worlds at times.

You quickly find that you’re helplessly addicted to their unavoidably catchy beats, masquerading within alt rock one moment (such as on I’m Glad You Exist) or lurching doom the next (on The Patron Saint of Lost Causes). They leap from overcast blackened moods to a guitar line that will be the funkiest thing you’ll hear all day without ay consideration for consistency in sound, a mathy mentality as a symptom of an overabundance of energy.

They pull it off too, these contrasts illuminating rather than confounding, a band able to juggle and converge elements of everything from hardcore to grunge, (whisper it) nu-metal to drawn out doom and leave you happy they have done so.

This is an apt pairing, two bands on the same slightly warped wavelength, more comfortable challenging your preconceptions of their sounds than taking the easy copy and paste route. It makes for a supreme split record.