doomgaze

Record #837: Iress – Flaw (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Discovering music is too easy these days.

I remember being a blossoming music fan at the turn of the millennium, surviving off of the scraps of burned CDs from friends’ older brothers, scouring message boards for the scent of morsels buried deep beneath the underground, trudging through tectonic-slow download speeds hoping that the files I’m downloading weren’t mislabeled. Maybe if I was lucky, the hours of time I put into that single song would be good enough to bid me to get my parents to drive me to the CD store and hope that they actually had it so I could fork over as much as twenty-four bucks in the hopes that more than just that one song was good.

Compare that to the process by which I discovered Flaw by Iress. I loaded up Bandcamp, went to the “Doomgaze” tag, and clicked on the first album I didn’t already know.

It was this one, and it was glorious: a chimera of dark synths, molten guitars, plodding drums, and soulful vocals that sounded like someone accidentally hired Cult of Luna as My Brightest Diamond’s backing band, but it was too late to reschedule the studio time, so they just went for it.

Luckily, it totally works.

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Record #835: Cloakroom – Dissolution Wave (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few bands have misrepresented themselves quite as severely as when Cloakroom described themselves as “stoner emo.” Certainly, there was no way that they could have predicted the wave of bands like Mom Jeans (and nothing like Cloakroom) that would be described as “weed emo,” but even without that confusion, there’s not much emo about what they’ve ever done. They have borne a resemblance to a certain 90s alternative band out of Champagne-Urbana, but they’ve always been much closer to HUM than Braid.

But the stoner bit…that’s never been up for debate. Extracurriculars aside, their guitars have always carried the same sort of heft as stoner metal bands like Kyuss and Sleep. But Dissolution Wave sounds the most like what I could imagine wafting out of my older brother’s bedroom carried with wisps of sage-masked pot smoke—if I had an older brother, anyway.

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Record #755: BIG|BRAVE – A Gaze Among Them (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Anybody who has even the most passing familiarity with this blog can tell that there are a few musical tropes that I cannot resist. Among them are crushing walls of sound, ominous, glacial tempos, lush atmospheres, and emotional female voices.

And Big Brave from Montreal delivers all these in spades, combining each of my favorite colors into a stunning landscape that is at once sonically crushing and achingly gorgeous.

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Record #747: Jesu – Terminus (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few members of the music scene are as prolific as Justin Broadrick. Since the first Jesu release in 2004, he has had more than twenty releases through that project, including a number of studio albums, EPs, splits, and collaborative albums.

Of those albums, I fell deeply in love with 2007’s Conqueror several years ago, but haven’t found anything else in his extensive catalogue that has captured me quite as tightly.

That is, until last year’s Terminus, which showcases his brand of sparkling bedroom doomgaze in an understated yet compelling way.

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Record #710: Circus Trees – Sakura (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Among music snob circles, teenage girls are a common punching bag.

Musicians with largely young, female audiences are relentlessly mocked. The tween fangirl is a common caricature of vapid music listeners. Overly sentimental love songs are often dismissed as trying to hit the 13-19 female demo.

But if teenage girls are so lame, how can the teen sisters in Circus Trees rock so hard?

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Record #697: Mountaineer – Bloodletting (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

If you’ve followed this blog at all, you’re already well aware that I have a very soft spot for a particular kind of heavy, glacial, melodic sludge metal (see: Isis, Cult of Luna, Mouth of the Architect, Spotlights, etc).

My friend Alex knows this, and so when he heard Bloodletting, the latest full length from California post metal outfit Mountaineer, his first reaction was to send me the link.

A few songs in, my first reaction  was to buy the record.  Said record has a label on it that says, “For Fans Of: Cult of Luna, Alcest, Torche, and Baroness.” That’s a pretty bold FFO if you can’t back it up. Luckily, Bloodletting proves it in spades.

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Record #671: Cloakroom – Infinity (2013)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Among all of the bands carrying the return of loud, low, heavy guitar music pioneered by bands HUM and Failure, one act is often hoisted above the rest as the standard bearers.

That band is Cloakroom, doomgazers/space rockers/slacker rockers  from Northwest Indiana (hey, that’s where I live)! And on their debut EP, Infinity, Cloakroom roars into infamy with the roar of a thousand amplifiers and an earth-crushing gravity.

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Record #662: The Angelic Process – Weighing the Souls With Sand (2007)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

One of my favorite things about music history is that no matter how deep you dig, there’s always another jewel to discover. As much as I love the ethereal, crushing heaviness of bands like Holy Fawn, Spotlights, Palehorse/Palerider, and the throng of other bands often labeled “doomgaze,” I never heard of the apparent pioneers of that sound until last week.

But once I did, their swan song Weighing the Souls with Sand immediately grabbed me with its rich atmospheres and overwhelming heaviness.

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Record #617: Holy Fawn – Death Spells (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It’s no secret that I have a very, very weak spot in my heart for music that blends metal’s punishing heaviness with unabashed prettiness. And the last few years (more specifically, ever since Sunbather brought further attention to the type of gorgeous metal that Alcest pioneered) scores of metal bands have been pushing into the dreamy lushness of shoegaze and post rock—and vice versa.

But few bands do it with the sort of shameless simplicity of Holy Fawn. And thus, few bands do it with as much success.

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