(Our DGR makes a rare (for him) foray into sludge/doom territory with the following review of a new album by the Nebraska crew Weaving Shadows, which they released in April of this year.)

Two things that have always been difficult to write about in this corner of the internet sewer: one, doom metal as a whole. Doom is a self-admitted perpetual blind spot for yours truly, having spent years ensconced in a comfortable bubble of moody and melancholic, pretty and polished, Euro doom usually on offer from the snow covered lands of the North. The often weed-obsessed, reverb-bathed, ’70s-influenced sects and the funeral-dirge cult, on the other hand, were often left on the wayside. A personal failing in the lack of patience for such a thing, and it is a failing that has led to vague overtures at attempts to fix – if nothing else than just to help serve as a custodial archivist of the cultural side of things.

The second: Nebraska, which is a place I have driven through a few times before, but my only lasting memories of the place are crossing the same river sixteen times, and the only man I’ve met whose name was “Guido” worked at a gas station there. So as you can see, we are starting from a tremendously strong context-heavy cultural touchpoint when it comes to the newest release from the Omaha-based doom metal band Weaving Shadows and their newest album Existential Decay.

Yet caustic sludge and doom knows no state boundaries nor humorous flippancy of an author on the internet. The language of plodding misery remains universal, bent and contorted through a variety of crawling tempos, distorted reverb, and feedback to drown in. If an album sounds closer to inching its way to the grave, all the better. Continue reading »