Article By: Pat ‘Riot’ Whitaker ‡ Edited By: Leanne Ridgeway
Meet the Chilean ambassadors of stoner doom/ sludge/ drone, the crushing behemoth thallMOTH, and its ‘ANVRF‘ album.
Recently dropped and now available on CD from The Explorer Records, ‘ANVRF‘ is somewhat an exploration of its own really. With a decidedly defined, drone-ish doom divination about it, this is a six-song slab of truly oppressive emissions.
Instrumentally-hewn with depth and bleak vibes, songs like “Momento Mori“, “Sclera” and “Comm Check” also ripple with psychedelic underpinning. Although doom they may be, there are comparisons that can be drawn to a band like Voivod, believe it or not.
For me, there are two stand-out compositions here, the first is the tad more uptempo “Null“, a nearly twelve-minute masterpiece of density and Pink Floyd-ian passages. The other is the album-ending “Message From ANVRF (Black Sabbath Tribute)” which is, exactly what you think it is… and says it is.
An immensely altered, effect-heavy take on “War Pigs“, albeit one gone all too hell on a bad LSD trip… but in a good way, ha! It takes a while to get to it but once the song’s reinterpreted music is reached, it is intrusively doomy. All while its otherworldly vocals – the only song with any – sound distant, as if being transmitted from another plane or dimension altogether.
All in all, thallMOTH serve up quite a burdensome deluge of sludgenend doom with its ‘ANVRF‘ album. Give it a slow-churning spin via the embed streaming here or head right HERE to purchase it.
