Lovingly pinched from The Obelisk: Originally a 2010 self-release, the self-titled debut from Boston bass / drum duo Olde Growth is given a second look thanks to MeteorCity. The 46-minute offering plays to a wide host of riffy influences, and the duo do well in carving out an identity for themselves among the melee of energetic songs. Of the seven tracks on Olde Growth, only the feedback interlude ‘Red Dwarf’ is under five minutes long, but the cuts nonetheless move quickly one to the next, and no matter what tempo they’re working in – thrashingly fast, drearily slow or somewhere in between – Olde Growth pull off an immediacy in the music that might be their greatest asset.
Parts abound in the songs, and there are both chorus-based and more linearly-structured passages (the third track is a three-parter), but as complex as bassist / vocalist Stephen Loverme and drummer Ryan Berry get, they don’t lose sight of either the thickness of tone or the subtle melodicism that finds its way into sections of Olde Growth, and that works much to the album’s benefit.
Being a duo with bass and drums and playing this genre, one would be remiss to not cite Om as an influence – conceptually if not musically. If that reference shows up anywhere, it’s in the late-album instrumental, ‘Everything Dies’, or the contemplative, subdued beginning of 10-minute closer ‘Awake’. The bulk of Olde Growth owes more to the likes of Sleep and High on Fire (if you want to stay in the same family tree of bands), with some more bombastic tertiary-feeling desert influence and a dose of Acid King’s expansive doom in the clean-sung sections of ‘Sequoia’.
Loverme, in addition to writing inventive riffs on which the songs are based, has a good sense for varying his vocal approach. Screams, shouts and melody are all well placed over the music, starting immediately with a rhythmic / melodic interplay on opener ‘The Grand Illusion’ that provides Olde Growth’s most memorable chorus. Lyrically centered around the occasional bit of epic stoner nature worship (see ‘Sequoia’), with ‘Cry of the Nazgul / The Second Darkness / To the Black Gate’ being – appropriately enough – a trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Olde Growth prove consistent mostly in terms of the quality of their material and the heaviness of atmosphere they affect. Everything else on these tracks feels like it could change at a moment’s notice.
Continue reading: The Obelisk » Blog Archive » Olde Growth, Olde Growth: Hear the Crying of the Wraiths.
(Courtesy of JJ Koczan / The Obelisk)
Tags: Album of the day, doom, JJ Koczan, Meteorcity, Olde Growth, Ryan Berry, sludge, Stephen Loverme, Stonerrock, The Obelsik
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2011 at 4:07 am and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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