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| Artwork by Erin Severson from Former Worlds. |
Some metal, especially in the sludgy-doom arena, can be deceptive. An album starts with a furnace blast to your face, filled with SUFFOCATING ANGUISH. You’re immediately sucked in, but then about 35 minutes later--which is only the second song--you sheepishly raise your hand and say, “I’ve anguishly suffocated enough, thank you.” Everything’s dialed to 11, and there’s little to differentiate one passage from the next.
Enter Former Worlds, who deftly avoid this trap on their first full-length, Iterations of Time. How do they manage it? Sure, the opener, “Spectre,” comes out blasting just as I described above, but listen to that rhythm section. They’ve got a filthy, slow-motion groove going on that carries the song along. Nobody’s going to mistake this for dance music, but might it be the rarely heard sludgy funk? (I hereby dub this microgenre Slunk™) It’s low and slow, but with a contradictory high energy and propulsion.
Add to that the songwriting skill--knowing when to bruise and when to step back to give the listener a little breathing room--and you have a four-song, 41-minute slab of doominess that holds your attention instead of abusing it. See “Variations on a Cave” for some of the band’s slick moves. There’s a higher-pitched line hanging eerily over the chugging, and vocalist Erin Severson mixes some lovely cleans in with her predominantly harsh bellows. I hate ending reviews with a negative, so I’ll say now there’s one point where the band slips, just a little. In the otherwise excellent “Widow Moon,” the closing track and the album’s longest, there’s an extended, quiet interlude in the middle that, although meditative and beautifully done, does have the effect of unmooring the song a bit. But this is a nitpick on an otherwise solid track.
If you’re looking for some genuinely inventive sludgy doom to kick off your year, you’d be hard pressed to do better than Iterations of Time. I knew I was going to write about this album halfway through the first listen, which is a testament to how hard this band can grab you and draw you in.