GAROTTING DEEP / FŌR
Void Asceticism (Split Album)
Iron Bonehead Productions (2015)
Rating: 7.5/10
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This split project features six tracks concerning Canadian extreme metallers Garotting Deep and Swedish black deathsters Fōr.
Garotting Deep is a strange brew which features lone musician Phil Fiess, who has carved out a career since 2010 and previously released one demo and been involved with two other split projects. Fiess conjures up three well-gurgled blasts of manky death metal channelled through his ashen warbles which are an interesting mix of harsh bellows and maniacal burbles, while the music plays out like some marrying of fusty gloom metal and faster, tinny echoes of disdain.
It’s very much archetypal doom-laden death metal with a truly underground feel spat out via the clanking chaos of ‘A Barrows Of Moss’ and the seedy, squalid rattle of ‘Garotting Deep’ which sounds half-Swedish, half phlegm-covered. The overall result is a bit of an eerie, atmospheric yet very much dungeon-blossomed eventual trio of tunes which culminate with ‘Heimta Thurs’, which is a cover of a track by Norwegian Nordic folksters Wardruna. It also happens to be the best track on offer, a weird bubbling silted brook of a cut beginning with abysmal dreary echoes and down-tuned plods of gloomy utterance.
It’s the sort of swampy mess that the word “clank” was invented for, because it just sounds to me like some tormented bog monster heaving and pawing its way through a mire of ash, fog, rust and dregs, and it’s one which never gathers pace – unlike the other two foetid offerings produced here.
The second band to envelope us is Fōr, a band even more terrifying than Garotting Deep – the name translate as “fire”. Fōr also seems to dabble in murky heaviness where cymbals hiss like whispering, mocking spirits and the drudgery of the guitar tone has the effect of cement slowly being poured down the gullet. Vocally, it’s a miserable case of remote Sasquatch bellowing as the fellow at the helm basically groans, yawns and growls in completely indecipherable fashion in pure doomy fashion over the backdrop of ever-greying tones of glumness.
The opening track for Fōr is the hypnotic sludge of ‘Behexed By Mortuary Chants’, and it simply exists like some landslide of greyness. It never gathers pace but is just happy to ooze, only punctuated by occasional drum rolls until a sudden break of pace and the blubbery mass makes for a quick exit. ‘Spraekjo’ begins as some sort of fuzzy, throbbing drone as if professor Quatermass has accidentally released some type of galactic anomaly from his laboratory, its only voice being a pit of horrified victims it swallows and those drab gasps of utmost horror and desperation which worm their way to the foreground in order to push the drab cacophony of guitar done to the distance.
The third track is ‘Nectars Of Serpents’, and it is another sonic ray to the brain; a foetid, sepulchral soundtrack of hums, whirs and then metallic advances based upon a foundation of billowing murk and what can only be described as remote speed metal combined with Bolt Thrower-styled debris which sounds as if it has been dropped from a great height and just makes the most bloody awful clanging.
As split projects go, both of these acts seem well matched when it comes to literally discharging forth such clotted metallic masses, and it really is the sort of choking, ghastly horror you’d most likely encounter after an atomic bomb has been dropped.
Neil Arnold
