ALBUM REVIEW: Old Smoke – Barishi

BARISHI releases have a propensity to call for several listens before they thoroughly start to make sense. The Vermont progressive black/sludge metal outfit doesn’t create routinely visceral crackers – they create rhythmically and constructively compound songs. It’s not usually unchallenging to know where their tunes are heading, and even so, they never hang in there for too long. Augmenting this is the truth that on their third studio album Old Smoke half of songs tend to stretch on for 10 or more minutes at a time, accentuating that BARISHI’s type of metal isn’t just intellectual – it involves a lot of power to pull off with the kind of accuracy and agility the way they play it.

Old Smoke is to a certain degree a model BARISHI album reflecting in the fact that it features many of the attributes the band has become known for: monstrous tempos, rigorous rhythmic intricacy and frantically detailed, yet melodic structures. Yet what makes it unusual for a BARISHI album is how condensed it is. It’s surprisingly close-packed, although its six songs add up to 50 minutes total.

That doesn’t mean Old Smoke is their most digestible album. When speaking about accessibility, the trio’s 2013 self-titled album and 2016’s Blood from the Lion’s Mouth are the ones with the bangers, so to speak, with each of these being comprised of many layers and taking unpredictable, alternative routes along the way. In fact, 2016’s full-length was almost bewilderingly opaque.

It is songs like the opening Silent Circle, The Longhunter and the title track that show the new BARISHI in its full grandeur. It’s hard to explain why this creation works as well as it does. Its marvellous havoc comprised of what feels like the multitude of riffs, staggering harmonies, continual pace shifts, infrequent peeks of groove, and Dylan Blake’s pugnacious, unorthodox drum work – all echoing and colliding into each other. In the meantime, the piercingly vicious yet varied Entombed in Gold Forever follows the same design. The outcome of such a perspective is tunes that sound like synopses of BARISHI’s earlier releases with an outstanding step forward in diversity and creativity.

It’s easy to let the absolute enigma of BARISHI’s songs become too much of a hurdle toward savouring it, but Old Smoke’s dominance is its musicality, rather than its technical aspect. BARISHI are still three musicians, forging out those outwardly incredible aural forms on guitars, drums and bass.

Old Smoke is in reality a colossal slice of music, and this is the most vigorous extract of BARISHI’s ethos yet. It’s the group’s most ostensibly scourged work since their debut, when their raid on black metal forms was still rather elementary. Here, they are displaying a projected vision of the genre that arises from and diversifies out. It’s as if, after so many years of penning songs large enough to traverse spheres, they took into consideration that Hades was right here on our soil.

Rating: 8/10

Old Smoke is set for release April 24th via Season of Mist.

Like BARISHI on Facebook.