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A Cry of Despair is Tree OF Sores' second of two EPs (and last one, since the band sadly split up in Sept. 2013). The three piece band from Leeds/UK play a sort of hard to categorize ambient sludge, doom, crust, post metal something.
This EP is one single track of nearly half an hour of playtime..., but soon I realize that time is a concept of irrelevance here. The quiet slow intro and the following heavy passage with the raw expressive vocals lure and seize and drag me deep into this song and I'm lost in its driving, hypnotic rhythms that carry me to some timeless place.
A combination of these entrancing rhythms and riffs and melodies that are kind of dancing and spiraling around them, take me along through waves that build up to powerful, thick sonic walls to crash down again and be caught on softer waves of quiet warm and transparent sounds. At one point about halfway through the song one of these quieter moments even comes near to a halt and fools me to think the song ended here. How do I know how long I've been listening... 10 minutes or an hour.... and what is time anyway? All I know is I don't want it to end here and the next clean warm guitar sounds initiating a new build up makes me happy.
In the second part of the song more and more distorted sounds and dissonances are added and condense into a kind of rain and thunder soundscape carrying a dark, melancholic and menacing atmosphere that completely sucks me up and more pounding drums and spellbinding, driving rhythms drag me along through the song.
A Cry of Despair feels like a journey across the ocean sometimes driven through rough powerful storms of relentless heaviness, sometimes carried on gentler waves of murky reflectiveness. There's a constant flow and motion until I'm finally brought ashore. Only now I notice that the abrasive vocals from the beginning, that I had hoped for to return, had not, which shows that the song is simply perfect the way it is.... 27:42 minutes long... (or short?... what was time again?...) and not one second is redundant or boring, each one is essential. The structure is somehow minimalistic, but there's plenty of nuanced sublime changes that make the song so dynamically organic and terrifically ingenious at the same time.
[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]
