If I was to make a list of my top ten bands to emerge over the past decade REZN would certainly be on this list. Back in February, they released Solace which proved to be an excellent slab of doom-gaze. I wasn’t expecting something else from them this year, but they are dropping this collaboration, Silent Futures (Blues Funeral Recordings) with Mexico City’s Vinnum Sabbathi.
Unfamiliar with Vinnum Sabbathi, I dug into their previous albums in order to sort through who is doing what on this album. Based on both band’s catalogs thus far it appears Vinnum is running narration of the samples. REZN is then in charge of all the trippy shoe-gazing prog guitars and most importantly the smooth croon of their vocalist Rob McWilliams. It opens more doors for Vinnum Sabbathi to experiment with a greater range of melodic elements, while most of what goes down here falls closer to REZN’S wheelhouse.
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Things open with an ambient-coated sample before the haunting atmosphere opens with its drone on the first two songs. It’s Rob’s compelling croon that makes things interesting and provides melodies to cement the sounds into songs.”Hypersurreal” takes the vocals on a more brooding trip through spaces as it creeps forward with more dynamic motion. The darker shades of sonics add to a more morose mood. This inspires McWilliams to cry out that he is all alone. This sentiment is believable given the stormy tension pulsing at the song’s core. While surreal samples of narrated interludes break things up, there is a hypnotic throbbing vibe that finds the songs gliding by with a haze of reverb soaking up Rob’s vocals. There is a cool slithering riff that works a descending pattern to carry the bulk of “Morphing”.
The drugs must have really kicked in during the session when they recorded “Obliterating Mists”. This song is dynamic enough to explore a range of emotion poured into their instruments that brings to mind the darker moments of Pink Floyd‘s dystopian musings to soundings like two bands that just got stoned and jammed, at times the songs sometimes hot box themselves into a bong-beaten trance.
Yet even at this album’s most droning moments, it still stands head and shoulders above the meanders of most stoner rock bands tripping their nuts off. I think this experiment worked in the favor of both bands as they work well together.
They might have raised the bar higher for themselves, so I appreciate that REZN decided to not try to further perfect what they did on their February release, so they combined their creative juices with Vinnum Sabbathi to create an album that is worth repeat listens to absorb what is going on here.
If you’re a stoner metal fan who finds yourself looking for darker more experimental psychedelic rock then this is going to be the album for you, so give it a listen the next time the clock hits 420.
Buy the album here:
https://rezzzn.bandcamp.com/album/silent-future
8 / 10
WIL CIFER