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KONGH
Sole Creation

Agonia (2013)
Rating: 7/10

Not to be confused with weird industrial instrumentalists Kong, Kongh are a Swedish combo who ply their trade by constructing monolithic doom but with a difference.

This four track album clocks in at some 45-minutes which gives you an idea of the length of each song. Kongh create cosmic landscapes of harsh terrain but without depressing the listener like so many so-called doom bands do. Where Kongh differ is in the grating chords, which at times touch on black metal style coldness, while vocalist David Johansson’s tortured warble is also effective amidst the chilly yet bludgeoning riffs.

Sole Creation (is that Bigfoot or Guy The Gorilla on the cover?!) is Kongh’s third opus, and without doubt their best musical journey. Album opener is the ten-minute title track which rumbles with a militant style drum and bleak chord before that killer, and very much European sounding groove kicks in. From here on it’s all very much crash, bang and wallop as the Swedish trio move with the grace of a concrete slug across the snow white wastes.

Vocally, Johansson mixes a black metal-style snarl with a strained doomy wail. All the while the guitars, which are at their busiest on this track, melt together doomy sludge and a more uptempo yet equally harsh chug.

Second track, the 11-minute ‘Tamed Brute’, is equally grey yet endearingly sonic with its pummeling drums and depressive riff. Thankfully, Kongh don’t opt for the unbearable slo-mo style of sludge. Instead, this occupies the same crushing corner as Warhorse and Burning Witch, with elements of Winter in its darkness.

Drummer Tomas Salonen is very much the vital cog of this cumbersome machine. His cymbals assault the eardrums, and the nine minute ‘The Portals’ provides no respite from the battering ram. The track, like ‘Tamed Brute’, begins as mere grim mood music, a barbed wire guitar screech that slowly blends in to the weighty drum rattle. ‘The Portals’ is probably the most lumbering track of the album, although Johansson’s epic drool does provide us with further austere insights into a sound which reminds me of Cathedral’s Forest Of Equilibrium (1991).

The album is brought to a close with the tip-toe eeriness of ‘Skymning’, which is relatively serene in its introduction in comparison to the previous trio of tracks. Johansson’s vocal style is more of a yawn this time, only accompanied – for the initial six minutes or so – by the tinkle of stark guitar, before another grey solemn riff washes over us. For all of its entire 14-minutes the track doesn’t really go anywhere, and certainly never raises its pace; it is a sprawling mass of gloomy guitars and morose drums that fades with the morning light.

Kongh certainly will not appeal to those music fans who seek chirpy inspiration. Instead, this is very much for the doom metal brigade who reveal in quicksand grooves and grey matter. The album art is very much reflective of the lonely beast that resides within, Kongh existing as some gargantuan relic that has no interest in daylight or companionship.

Neil Arnold

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