Album Type: Full
Length
Date
Released: 24/03/2017
Label: Artificial Head Records
“Bread Solstice”, the
debut full length from the Brooklyn based doom
outfit Mountain God, sounds like a creature born in the depths of a hidden
cavern. Wet reverb echoes through the album as if it were splashing off of cave
walls and demented vocals wander through the mix like a whisper from the shadows. “Bread Solstice” is filled subterranean
rumbles of fat guitar tone, distant, tortured vocals and chilling aura. It is
an album that roars like the echoes of a distant thunderstorm.
“Bread
Solstice” DD//LP track listing:
1).Scaling The Silver Step
2).Nazca Lines
3).Karmic Truth
4).Junglenaut
5).Unknown Ascent
6).Hymn To Nothing
The Review:
“Bread
Solstice”, the debut full length from the Brooklyn based doom outfit Mountain God, sounds like a creature born in the depths
of a hidden cavern. Wet reverb echoes through the album as if it were splashing
off of cave walls and demented vocals wander through the mix like a whisper
from the shadows. All the ambience results in a sort of looseness that causes “Bread
Solstice” to be the sort of
doom album that you feel in your head rather than your gut, but Mountain God prove
that that is in no way has to be a bad thing. “Bread Solstice” is filled subterranean rumbles of fat
guitar tone, distant, tortured vocals and chilling aura.
The
album begins with a gradual fade in
on its opening track, the shambling tempo, mostly instrumental “Scaling
The Silver Steps”. Vocals make their first appearance on the album at
over three minutes into “Scaling The Silver Steps”, and when
they do, it is more like the dying hiss of a reptile than a human voice. “Nazca
Lines”, the album’s longest track, (at eleven and a half minutes)
follows. The track starts with a grimly melodic guitar passage, which is looped
as the rest of the band creeps into the mournful clamour. The track unfolds and
develops over its remaining nine minutes, but never breaks from the utter
bleakness that defines its beginning. The lengthy study of dolefulness that is “Nazca
Lines” is followed by the album’s hardest hitting track, the mid tempo,
sludgy stomper “Karmic Truth”, creating a very effective contrast.
All
the doomy, cavernous echoes to be found on the first three tracks of “Bread
Solstice” might as well have been bone dry when compared to the album’s
next two tracks, “Junglenaut” and “Unknown Ascent”. While “Junglenaut”
has a backdrop of foaming guitar chugging under its beginning, both tracks are
washed in so much reverb that they sound as if they are being performed on the
top of some massive mountain far away, and the sounds you are hearing are echoes
that drift to the valley below. I would imagine this was Mountain God’s exact
intention.
The
album closes on its second longest song and possible standout track, the nine
minute long “Hymn To Nothing”. Beginning with a simplistic drum beat
pounding through a haze of wind-like white noise, “Hymn To Nothing” then
greets the listener with a frosty bass line that develops into a gargantuan
riff once the guitars join. “Hymn To Nothing” is stylistically
closer to classic doom metal than anything else to be found on “Bread
Solstice” and its occasional
breaks into clean sections only add to the intensity once the fuzzed out riffs
return. Full of sinister pleasures, Bread
Solstice roars like the echoes of a distant thunderstorm.
