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STOMACH EARTH
Stomach Earth

Black Market Activities (2013)
Rating: 7/10

I’m not sure if you’ve ever had a gravestone dropped on your head from a great height, but I’m guessing that Stomach Earth is the musical equivalent to such an unfortunate experience.

Fans of this sort of gloomy music will no doubt be eager to categorise such a sludgy sound as funereal doom, and you wouldn’t be far wrong. Salem, Massachusetts-based Stomach Earth is very sloooow! And grey… and quite often rather weird in their cold, isolated log cabin that has rarely been visited by man.

Stomach Earth consists of one-man mammoth slayer Mike McKenzie, who is responsible for those heavyweight, caveman riffs and equally arctic vocals. The anomalous manifestation on the cover pretty much sums up this eerily monstrous slab of a record, the slow-motion gurgles and plods acting as a murky soundtrack to the uprising of that foetid abomination of a creature that seeks the glow of light.

Stomach Earth is a 50-minute, seven-track affair that is truly gargantuan and stomps across the wasted landscape like some out of control stone golem. Despite each punishing riff resorting my ears to dust, I’m actually enthralled by this dreadful noise. There is enough going on here amid those ashen vocals and ghoulish drones to captivate the listener, with Stomach Earth being far more potent and remote than the countless stoner sludge acts which have been clogging up my ears over the years.

McKenzie injects some surreal and often atmospheric effects into the cold fog, enabling the slug-like motion of songs such as ‘The One They Fear’ to exist as formidable and almost industrialised labyrinths of sound. Sure, Stomach Earth is far from innovative, but it’s such a huge gaping hole of a sound that once you’re inside this glacier you’ll quickly become suffocated by the mournful dirge that is ‘Void Angel Ritual’, and the pounding atrocity that is ‘Watchers’.

The vocals have a ghastly, watery edge to them as they echo across the vast terrain of clanking drums and rusty, down-tuned guitars. Rarely is there time for a breath, except when McKenzie introduces us to each track. This is usually via some odd cosmic interlude, such as on the ten-minute sprawl of ‘Reaching The Threshold’ – a track which runs from an almost tranquil sigh to a distant white noise murmur, before another leviathan of a riff crashes through the icy wall.

Stomach Earth is most certainly for those who like torturous doom metal, but there’s an element of the avantgarde and the industrial here, so if you are able to blank out the rays of summer and hibernate for a year or two, then let this creeping plague of a record be your guide. Not for the easily crushed!

Neil Arnold

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