ALBUM REVIEW: The Coral Tombs – Ahab
Nautik doom progenitors AHAB return once more, breaching the surface like some loathsome, gargantuan beast before crashing back down to cause a tidal wave of gloomy destruction. Their first album in eight years, The Coral Tombs sees the German extreme doom quartet take inspiration from yet another maritime novel – this time Jules Verne‘s 1870 masterpiece 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, and like the murky depths of such a hostile environment, The Coral Tombs contains one or two surprises.
In fact, you won’t have to wait long for the first one, as Prof. Aronnax’ descent into the vast oceans opens with searing blast beats and unfathomable brutality. This isn’t the AHAB we’ve come to expect, but to help them pull off this explosion of aural violence, they employed the help of ULTHA‘s Chris Noir to go scorched earth on your eardrums in a riotous cacophony of extremity. But when AHAB takes back full control of this ship, we do get the nautically-minded funeral doom that have served them so well for the best part of two decades. Vocalist Daniel Droste sounds brighter and more accomplished than ever before and the tandem guitar work of Droste and Christian Hector is bright and crisp, thunderous and devastating in the appropriate measures.
Colossus of the liquid graves sounds as gargantuan as the devilfish that attack the Nautilus. The riffs are violent, the vocals monstrous and the drums threatening, but it’s the production that really starts to shine here. The track is so meticulously layered and well put together, maintaining a rawness through the thick tones and wailing notes, it feels like you’re in the room with AHAB.
But for all their extreme doom chops, AHAB are more than capable to slowing things down and getting real beautiful with it. The latter half of The sea as a desert is ponderous and dreamy in its instrumentation, the vocals soaring and emotive, all resulting in a deeply arresting few minutes that are bound to stagger in a live setting. Similarly, when they plumb their funeral doom roots on A Coral Tomb, it feels as if there is nothing else in the world, only Droste’s long, drawn-out growls that shake you to your core, only the unnerving crawl of the guitars and bass, only the sparse emptiness of the drums.
Closing these seven tracks and 64 minutes is Mælstrom, which welcomes ESOTERIC mastermind Greg Chandler to deliver the final brutal passages of The coral tomb in an earth-shattering one-two with Droste. His anguished, garbled screams are laced with so much reverb that it feels as if the echo will never end, a perfect representation for the unknown endlessness of the deep blue seas.
There’s a reason why AHAB are such revered masters of extreme doom. Here on The Coral Tombs, they sound just as big and bold as you’d hope, and their expert talent for adapting literature into such visceral aural bodies of work continues to astound. It’s wholly too early in the year to be talking about end of year lists, but don’t be surprised to see this make a few appearances come December.
Rating: 9/10
The Coral Tombs is set for release on January 13th via Napalm Records.
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