TOMBS – FERAL DARKNESS

(Andy Synn isn’t shy about declaring himself a fan of the new album from Tombs, out now)

It’s funny, isn’t it, the ways in which we define ourselves? The ways in which “who we are” is so often bound up in the things we like (or don’t like).

It isn’t always healthy of course – toxic fan culture is a continuous blight, as we all know, and choosing to base your entire personality around your obsessive fandom of anything (or anyone) is a recipe for dysfunction and depression – but our likes and dislikes definitely form a distinct part of our self-image.

And yet it’s so easy for this image to become distorted or outdated.

Case in point, I’ve been a fan of Brooklyn-based Black Metal quartet Tombs for a very long time now – if you’d asked me I definitely wouldn’t have hesitated to describe myself as such – but it was only while working on my review of their new album that I realised that you’d have to go pretty far back (possibly even as far as 2017’s The Grand Annihilation) to find the last thing they did that I truly loved.

But, thankfully, with the release of Feral Darkness just last week, you no longer have to go very far at all to experience the band at their very best.

Now I’m not saying that Monarchy of Shadows or Under Sullen Skies were bad records by any means – in truth I don’t think you could have an album like Feral Darkness without going through the aforementioned releases first – but, especially in hindsight, you can tell that the band still hadn’t quite found the right way to organically integrate all their different influences and impulses.

That’s not a problem this time around, however, as the album’s sinuous flow between blistering, blackened blastery and swaggering, sludgy groove – augmented by touches of gloomy gothic glamour and moody Post-Punk melancholy that manifest in subtle layers of simmering synths and eerie ambient electronics barely perceptible to the human ear on first listen – suggests that the group have finally found the balance they’ve been searching for… and finally fulfilled the full promise of their long-gestating evolution.

Darkly anthemic opener “Glass Eyes / Ghoul”, for example, kicks things off with some chunky, churning riffage which lays down a dense, almost deathly foundation for the rest of the track – a combination of harsh-yet-hooky Black Metal and ugly, undulating Sludge reminiscent of Goatwhore and Ruins at their best – to build upon, before transitioning smoothly into the infectiously grim ‘n’ grimy (not to mention monstrously groovy) title-track.

This, in turn, shifts seamlessly into the crushing, Celtic Frost-esque crawl of “Granite Sky” (both tracks benefitting from some subtle injections of crooning clean vocals reminiscent of the great Tom G. Warrior himself) before the morbidly melodic strains of “The Sun Sets” provide you with what will likely be the most majestic piece of abject misery and dismal catharsis you’re going to hear until the next Triptykon album drops.

And it’s this sense of constant, dynamic movement – the hauntingly hypnotic finale of the latter track dissipating just in time for the lashings of seething blastbeats and surging guitars which make up “Last Days” to burst out of the speakers, after which the dense, almost doomy, weight of “The Wintering” (where the impact of the album’s hefty guitar tone and thick, rumbling bass sound is even more apparent) gives way to the savage assault and scorched-earth atmospherics of “Black Shapes” – which really captures the band’s increased confidence this time around, having learned all the lessons they needed to from their previous works.

Ok, maybe not all the lessons… as Feral Darkness is still a little too long for its own good – as much as I like the grisly, guitar-driven grind of “Wasps” (“Glaeken” I can take or leave, however) it’s clear, after multiple listens, that the album really reaches its natural climax with the sinister, yet insidiously seductive (thanks, in part, to the utterly sublime vocals of Sera Beth Timms) strains of “Nightland” – but even this (relatively minor) issue can’t change the fact that this is easily the band’s best work in a decade (if not more).

Not only that but, on a purely personal level, Feral Darkness is in many ways exactly the sort of album I was hoping that their fellow New Yorkers (and long-time favourites of the blog) Black Anvil would put out as a follow-up to the stunning As Was (which this one is very comparable to)… but where they seemed to struggle to integrate all the new sounds and styles they wanted to play with, and ended up losing touch with who they were in the process, Tombs have successfully coalesced into a new form here, one which not only maintains (if not further solidifies) their connection to their Black Metal roots but also draws in aspects and elements of other genres even more closely to their core to create something distinctly and effortlessly them.

You might say, then, that I’m a fan.