Ghost Cult once again brings you another “End Of Year” list, as we close out 2016. Today we get a list from David Gates of Nashville sludge and doom rockers Season Of Arrows. The band just signed a new record deal with Argonauta Records, Give it to the Mountain, due out on March 24th 2017. David puts down his axe, and picked up his laptop to send us in his essential list of albums from this past year, and it’s killer!Continue reading
The world of sludge/doom metal continues to impress as veterans, Graves at Sea, attempt to blow your mind with their first full length, The Curse That Is (Relapse Records). This album ensures that you feel nice and grimey by the end of the seventy-seven minute journey that is anything but a curse. By the end of said journey, your head will feel like a crushed soda can on the side of the road from the power of the fuzzy riffs.
The greatest part about The Curse That Is would have to be how each track is its own story yet nothing strays too far from the over feel of the record. With a short build up, Graves at Sea hits you with album title track ‘The Curse That Is’ to jump-start the album. The whole introduction is a nice sample plate of what kind of guitar leads you can expect but then drops down to a sluggish tempo. ‘Tempest’, although one of the shorter tracks, certainly feels like a storm of heavy riffs and thunderous drumming, destroying everything in its path. Crushing riff after riff, the onslaught does not stop for over seven minutes. As the storm passes, we witness the aftermath in ‘The Ashes Made Her Beautiful’. This fifteen minute epic slows down and pulls at your heartstrings through the first half of the song. A tad past the midpoint comes quite the build up which finally spills over to another heavy yet fuzzy passage of this story. The ending continues to grow on itself and spills into a final refrain of the chorus.
The Curse That Is turned out to be quite a listening adventure for me which I time and time again keep coming back to. From start to finish I did not feel like there were any weak spots as each track really brought its own characteristics to the table. As much as I did like the shrieking vocals on each track, I think just slightly altering this up on a track or two more would have scored a few more points with keeping every element on the record fresh. Having said that, I would not even call that a complaint and nor do I really have any with this release. Graves at Sea really knocked this one out of the park on their first go at a full length.
8.5/10
TIM LEDIN
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