(DGR has made a fortunate new discovery, one outside his usual musical wheelhouses, and seeks to spread the word about it in the following review.)
Every year brings a cycle in which I swear up and down to try and expand my musical horizons, which for the most part I absolutely fail at. The early reaches of the year are usually the prime territory for this grand venture to have any hope of success though, because it is somewhat reliable – save for an odd plotting of years wherein January saw a giant flood – that those early parts will have plenty of room for new artists to take a shot at being out there and get some spotlight.
That beginning part of the year is a time of discovery, and every year does have a few interesting acts manage to break through the white noise in comparison to the summer exploraitons of old reliables and groups timing their releases around festival runs. This year, like I have in years past, has had me attempting to explore the doom genre some more, because if there’s any blind spot that I can openly admit to, the fuzzier side of doom is absolutely one of them. These ventures are a lot of fun because you can break past a surface-level understanding of things and actually acheive some sort of musical growth. If nothing else, it provides a new perspective point from which to see things.
The shaggier, fuzzed-out, and stoner side of doom will always have its fair share of oddballs. The walls of reverb and slow to mid tempos must be artistically freeing, and in that respect you do get groups who will name themselves some eyebrow-raising things just for the sheer fun of it. To explore this side of the genre is to be willingly caught off-guard from all ends, and that is how you wind up with a name like Mr. Crabman & The Seaweeds crossing your desk, amplified even more by their home location of the obviously well-known yet clearly easily missed psychadelic doom capital of the world…Finland.
Nothing In Return is only Mr. Crabman and The Seaweeds’ second full-length but this is not a project that has sat around quietly since their founding. They had existed on a consistent collective of singles and EPs up until last year’s full-length Heat Of A Dead Sun. Less than a year later, Mr. Crabman and The Seaweeds unleashed that previously mentioned second album in mid-February, showcasing a band that for all the assumed slow tempos and reverb-wash is clearly creatively restless as ever.
Weighing in at seven songs and roughly twenty-seven minutes, Nothing In Return is an explorative doom and sludge metal hybrid, stepping ever-further along a path that their first full-length had charted. With years of EP and single experience under their belt at this point, Mr. Crabman and The Seaweeds are as refined as one could imagine and Nothing In Return is a clear demonstration of what a strong grasp they have on their musical vision at this moment.
In reality the track-list breakdown is closer to five fully realized tracks and two shorter interstitial numbers – one of which is used to close out the album. Nothing In Return is so replete with ideas and rolling waves disguised as grooving guitar riffs that you’re not going to feel shorted. Twenty-seven minutes of a band that seems to rock with the pacing of the world’s most meditative tectonic event is a great amount of time. Just enough time to get comfortable but not enough to let the mind drift too far away from the music at hand.
The shorter numbers serve as a great introduction to the “bigger” song that follows it, and also closing out the whole affair in the case of “Overcome”, but they are also doing expected work wherein they tie all of Nothing In Return into one solid number. “Overcome”, for instance, begins right as “It Turn To Dust” ends with a final slow, sweeping crawl and chaotic crashing out on the drum kit and consists mostly of pensive and quiet guitar, verging on blues guitar being played from someone’s front step, with a final bit of narration. Your biggest hint that you’re within the boundaries of a more “full” song for Mr. Crabman and The Seaweeds then, comes not from the music itself but just about any time vocalist/guitarist Niki Laukkanen takes the stage with the joyous abandon of a stoned frog that has swallowed an air compressor and a foghorn and is determined to see in what radius he can wake up the neighbors.
While both “Carry The Corpse” and “Ocean’s Hymn” were released as advance singles ahead of the album – and again, with such a compressed timescale between Nothing In Return and the group’s previous album, it must’ve felt like the Crabman crew just weren’t slowing down – they do deserve a shoutout within the confines of Nothing In Return as well. Landing early in the album, “Carry The Corpse” does good work continuing the rollicking reverb rodeo that began on album opener “Downward Paths”, and “Ocean’s Hymn” allows for The Seaweeds to have themselves the closest they’ll get to a sing-a-long power chorus.
That beginning three-pack is enough to seal just about anyone’s impression of what Mr. Crabman and The Seaweeds are aiming for on Nothing In Return. They’re so concrete in their foundations of the psychadelic side of doom that when things actually get much sludgier with the vocal-overlays and downword force of “Infinite Houses” it almost comes as a surprise. Up until the aforementioned brief drifting of “Imploding” as the album lays the groundwork for it’s last three-song movement, Nothing In Return could’ve just skated by as being a solid block of stoner doom with a bit of retro-flair hanging around the fringes like a pack of celebrity hanger-ons. Instead Mr. Crabman and The Seaweeds use that extra bit of genrefication to make this album a little more dynamic and to reach beyond the usual artistic grounds.
Yet, as we have mused above, Nothing In Return runs at a near-perfect length for what it is trying to do musically. No band – save for the grind groups out there – likely wants to hear the phrase “Thanks for keeping it short, guys”, but credit to the band that they’ve recognized how to be surgical with their sound such that it doesn’t overstay their welcome and remains just as much a treat from moment one to moment twenty-six. Given that you also have an album from last year as well to help soften the blow, you could treat Nothing in Return as a welcoming hand to a fantastic adventure into an unexpected corner of the psychadelia and sludge-worshipping corner of the doom sphere.
Broken out into its own little world, Nothing In Return is a great time for those who like a guitar that seems to bend more than a circus act, rhythm sections that can roll better than a boulder downhill, and vocals hovering somewhere between monstrous bellow and decadently sung. Leaping past the name – which we’ve attempted to dance around with the grace of studied ballerinas – Mr. Crabman and The Seaweeds have a seriously good time with Nothing In Return and it is infectious enough to spill through into the listening experience as well.
https://mrcrabmantheseaweeds.bandcamp.com/album/nothing-in-return
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