(In this post DGR reviews the new fourth album, now available on Bandcamp, by the one-man entity known as The Howling Void.)

Winter has descended upon Northern California, leaving us all frozen in ice cubes every morning at the shock of sub-thirty-degree weather. As usual, the melancholy mood that strikes around this time of year has found us once again, and so we shift in terms of music from the speed, tech-death, thrash, melo-death, and grind upon which most of this year’s listening has been spent and crawl into to the familiar comforts of the slow, depressing depths of the metal subgenre known as doom — specifically, the type that is remarkably European, laden with keyboards, and created to make the listener envision vast, open fields covered in snow or cities long destroyed, slowly being overtaken by ice. Ethereal almost, if the word strikes you.

When Nightfall by The Howling Void came across the metaphorical desk of yours truly it peaked my interest, in part by defining itself as glacially slow doom and in part because it came from Texas. Not to generalize North America in any sense, especially considering the humongous variety of metal that we have put out and adapted to our own sensibilities over time, but much of the doom that seems to come out of this continent is of the low-fi, fuzzed out, stoner doom sect, rarely using the term “glacial”.

“Glacial” brought up images of slow-moving ice and thus immediately connected to the idea of the more ethereal brand of doom that seems to be a mainstay in Europe, especially when combined with this album’s forest-themed artwork and the band’s logo. From the very start, these signposts made it pretty clear what The Howling Void aimed to achieve on Nightfall, and the album succeeds, coming out of nowhere with a pleasant surprise of that slow, depressing movement for which we come to this genre. Continue reading »