ALBUM REVIEW: Looking For Transcendence – Indigo Raven
With its origins in the 1970s and an avalanche of development in the past 20 years, doom is a modern genre in the grand scheme of music. What Toulouse-based INDIGO RAVEN have masterfully done on debut album Looking For Transcendence is bring doom to its spiritual, ‘olde worlde’ roots.
From the outset, INDIGO RAVEN’s shamanic influences are apparent; a soundscape of almost ritualistic chants and hollers opens Our Sacred Soil, before this erupts into a glacial, apocalyptic riff. This is not the heaviest album you will hear this year, but it is apparent right away that this is the true soundtrack to the end of the world.
Palin Genesis opens with a twinkly sci-fi refrain that gives way to that primal, brooding concoction of all the best doom elements. The pounding, minimalist drums, the crawling, rumbling guitars and intoxicating vocals here in particular capture you in a trance. This track may offer the best display of what it is that INDIGO RAVEN does: decrying modern invention and lobbying for the world to return to its primitive, natural state. It’s a special accomplishment for that to come across in the music itself, but it is put across so thoughtfully that it’s impossible to resist.
The key highlights on the album lie with Small-Hearted & Blind, and album closer Where Lies Our Heart. The former is a gargantuan slice of modern doom that would make AMENRA proud; the latter an entirely a cappella ballad to the natural world. In just these two tracks, the trio of vocalist Julie Docteur, bassist Jean Grey and multi-instrumentalist and producer Benoît Sangoï showcase the very best of the whole gamut of doom, delivering with aplomb on both ends of the spectrum.
Within these two tracks we also find some of the most emotionally-charged moments of the record. From “I’m ashamed of my kind because we’re small-hearted and blind”, to “Do the animals break each other’s hearts too? Do they take their own lives? Do they live in despair, the same way as we do?” – this is poetry for the apocalypse, and there is no escaping that the human race has only itself to blame.
The CD version of the album closes with a bonus cover of MAZZY STAR’s seminal Into Dust, which is delivered with such conviction that it is a wonder that no band has made a full-blown project of this combination already. This isn’t a cover that particularly changes the original – it’s an incredibly faithful reimagining of the haunting classic, and Docteur’s vocals lend a comparable emotional heaviness to those of Hope Sandoval – but it is spectacular and does enough to make it feel special and new all over again.
Presented in a neat seven-track package that doesn’t outstay its welcome, and containing so many ideas without feeling threadbare or cobbled together, Looking For Transcendence is sublime. Not just one of the best doom albums of the year, but one of the best debut albums of any genre in 2021. It’s quintessential listening for fans of the genre, and for those yearning for a better world.
Rating: 9/10
Looking For Transcendence is set for release on October 22 via Argonauta Records.
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