ninehertz

If you’re going to name your debut EP Lurking Doom then you best be ready deliver on the misery. Fixroom, from Ljubljana, not only smash it, but go way beyond, crafting something of vast darkness.

There are only two songs yet 25 minutes are spent laying out this oppressive doom display. As the sample of a calm voice belonging to a disassociated suicidal youth opens, you can sense the misanthropic stall laid out, and that’s even before a murky guitar tone overpowers your senses, a foreboding beginning to such a lengthy experience. Vocals are fittingly depraved cries from the dark, the whole a bleak, barely moving sludge monster with such heaviness in so few notes. A little change up five minutes through merely allows for a reapplication of the lumbering riff by which point you realise this is up there with those doom-to-the-extreme releases that, if it clicks and you maybe hate yourself a little bit, is an absolute blast, an aural flagellation over fourteen minutes. It is excellent, a static crusted tone that is absolutely filthy. Five minutes more and they simply lock into the riff and revolve, shaking you by your ankles in ear-damaging heavy bliss.

The second track doesn’t provide any release, one more time you have to face up to the towering dread. Even when braced for it this time round, the crackling guitar still hits with significant weight. The tottering riff is belligerent, like a Meth Drinker blow out binge session. There’s certainly more momentum in this track but only as a conveyor belt of increasingly blackened, ill-intentioned riffs, one after another clogging the airs.

This is doom at its unhealthy, troublesome fringes, a dangerous look in its eye as it glares at you from the gutter. That Fixroom have found this state on their first attempt is incredible, but maybe a concern for their wellbeing too. It is a superb introduction to their world.