Contributors: Lord Mokrap, T, C, Danny Martin, and Yonder Tarr
Rwake: Voices of Omens
Seek this album out with a painful urgency. Play the album. Close your eyes and allow yourself to be completely subjugated by the potent morass seeping from your speakers. Follow the lead of your restless mind. A grizzled, hoary prophet in tattered robes wanders the backwoods of Arkansas. With a feral gleam in his eyes he screeches dire diatribes on the certain doom wrought by the folly of man. Distant fires dot the landscape. Leaves crunch beneath frantic feet. The odor of brimstone greets quivering nostrils. You are enveloped by the oppressive cloud of atmospheric sludge that is “Voices of Omens.”
One might reasonably wonder what type of git-pickin, skin-beatin, and holler-yollerin could conjure such morbidly florid ruminations. The sum of “Voices of Omens” is certainly greater than the individual parts, and the relationship between the ingredients holds the key to the bitter kick of this murky concoction. The album is driven by a fat and dirty bottom end, against which the often-ethereal riffing is positioned brilliantly. Like cobwebs on the branches of a gnarled old tree, riffs of varied textures and densities suspend nimbly from the massive anchor of meandering bass. Searing through the thick layers of instrumental gloom are vocals that range from the harried speech of a condemned man to the shrill shrieks of a fellow being burnt at the stake. The skeleton supporting this slithering beast of an album is the fluid drumming. Frequent-yet-moderate shifts between slow and mid pacing keep the listener keenly engaged, and the liberal use of cymbals adds an eerily shimmering air to the broader soundscape.
“Voices of Omens” may well be the single greatest sludge album released on this side of the millennium. It took a meat-and-potatoes genre and injected a bevy of subtle and varied layers, creating a final product that marries grooving crunch to an atmospheric complexity rarely found outside of black metal circles. However, putting aside attempts to bottle lightning with perennially inadequate genre designations, it should suffice to say that “Voices of Omens” provides a transcendent experience… and it packs one hell of a punch. Seek this album out with a painful urgency!
-Yonder Tarr
