ALBUM REVIEW: All Of This For Nothing – The Crawling
Beginning life in the small Irish city of Lisburn in 2014, THE CRAWLING have quickly become one of the best underground death-doom acts out there today. Although much of the band’s earliest material came thick and fast, with an E.P and two albums – Anatomy Of Loss and Wolves And The Hideous White – under their belt by late 2018, they’ve spent most of the last four and a half years honing their craft as a live act, taking Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English venues by storm and garnering themselves a small but rabid fanbase in the process. Luckily, the near five-year wait for new music has been well worth it, as the band’s third album All Of This For Nothing is not just their best work to date, but arguably one of the best death-doom albums to come out of the underground in quite some time.
March Of The Worm, with its crawling guitar lines and military drum beat, sets an ominous tone, gradually building towards sinister, mid-paced death-doom with brilliantly chunky guitars and throaty vocals. It makes for a muscular, brooding start to the record, bringing to mind classic acts like AUTOPSY whilst possessing a modern, polished production. Another Vulture, a lengthier, bleaker offering that embraces a crisper guitar sound and intricate drums, creates a lighter, layered sound that still packs a punch when the weightier distortion kicks in, giving this song the feel of a hulking juggernaut with some excellent, atmospheric flourishes. The dense gutturals and angular leads provide a lot of intense hooks, throwing in enough variety to keep the listener on their toes.
Thy Nazerene, by contrast, is a short but powerful track that leans into a murkier, hypnotic guitar sound that allows the vocals to come to the fore and carry this song much more effectively. It’s got a palpable haunting feel to it, with just enough of a thick, rhythmic death metal undercurrent to provide a few harsher moments without overdoing it, allowing the dramatic qualities of the music to be the focal point as opposed to the aggression. Bound To The Negative applies these impactful cinematic tropes to a longer form, serving as a slow-burning and diverse take on death-doom that shifts from the crystalline, cleaner guitars to meatier, droning moments that have a hint of funeral doom to them, with some of this track’s earliest moments moving with an almost glacial crawl. The melodic leads also work extremely well, counterpointing the heavier moments perfectly by adding a slicker element that helps accentuate the ferocity of the driven and caustic moments, making this one of the album’s more eclectic numbers.
Leaving The Skin is another fantastically light and punchy offering that shows the band’s catchier side, with subdued guitars, powerful rhythms and soaring leads making this a more accessible track. It incorporates a subtle gothic edge into the thunderous death-doom, turning this into a leaner, more focused piece of music that’s very easy to get drawn in by. A Light We Cannot See goes in the opposite direction, embracing doom-laden hooks, a monolithic undercurrent and fierce gutturals, having a solid death metal feel that is tempered by sombre melodies that inject a lot of character into what is an incredibly visceral and brooding affair. Sparrow caps things off with a grandiose, atmospheric song that couples a cavernous sound with guitar work that treads a fine line between polished melodicism and grating discordance, and ends up being coarse and memorable in equal measure, with the primal roar of the vocals adding plenty of sonic depth to the varied music that they accompany, concluding the album in epic fashion.
Although the band’s first two albums are undoubtedly impressive in their own right, All Of This For Nothing proves to be THE CRAWLING‘s magnum opus. Everything, from the song-writing, musicianship and even the album’s concept, feels a lot more focused and cohesive than on their earlier records, meaning that the album as a whole, rather than just a few key songs, are on top form, with very little if anything in the way of filler being present at all. Furthermore, despite the fact that the band’s influences, from the rabid death-doom of AUTOPSY through to the punchy gothic pomp of PARADISE LOST, are certainly noticeable at times, the sound at this album’s core is more distinctly the band’s own, allowing their character and voice to come through more so than it has in the past. This is an album that marks THE CRAWLING out as perhaps one of the best and most promising acts within the new crop of underground death-doom bands that have been emerging in the last few years, setting the bar that much higher for themselves, and indeed their peers, to surpass.
Rating: 8/10
All Of This For Nothing is out now via GrindScene Records.
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