ALBUM REVIEW: The Decline – Turbid North
TURBID NORTH are the kind of band that make a reviewer’s job pretty difficult; in a good way of course. The Alaska-born and now Texas-based trio seem to have missed any and all lessons on genres and gate-keeping and instead have settled on doing whatever takes their fancy at any given moment, with perhaps the sole entry requirement being that it has to be staggeringly heavy. Their third album The Decline throws an awful lot at the wall across its 43-minute runtime, and it’s a triumph that so much of it seems to stick.
Central to this success is the fact that TURBID NORTH rarely have the aura of a band who are good at one thing and just playing around with the rest. One gets the sense that if they just wanted to be a grindcore band, they could – as proven decisively by the minute and a half of violence that comprises fifth track Patients for example. Likewise though, it seems perfectly reasonable that the trio could hang with the best of the sludge, doom and post-metal scenes if they devoted all their time to writing songs like Eternal Dying and Life Over Death; and even that fails to cover the more melodic David Gilmour-esque influences heard in the playing of guitarist Nick Forkel, or indeed the bits of thrash metal and stoner rock that often crop up across these ten tracks too.
It’s a unique and fascinating mix for sure, but perhaps even more important is the question of how well it all holds together. Again, TURBID NORTH tick a fair few boxes in this regard. Devoted as they are to all things utterly crushing, it doesn’t really matter if the band are blasting full-speed ahead or if they’ve slowed things to a glacial crawl as everything carries the same apocalyptic weight. It flows well too, not only through clever tricks and juxtapositions like placing the grindier fury of Slaves directly after the suffocating sludge of The Oppressor, but also by eschewing any predictable pattern of ‘slow one, fast one, slow one’ and thus keeping listeners a little more on their toes throughout.
Points should also be awarded for the album’s production, which was handled entirely by the aforementioned Forkel. He’s given the trio an absolutely massive sound, and while there are definitely some overdubs and layers in the mix, for the most part it does feel like you’re listening to the three-piece interacting and collaborating with one another in real time.
The only negative really is that this album might be even more impactful were it just a little shorter. Of course, 43 minutes is hardly a ludicrous ask, but with so much going on it does feel like the record loses focus ever so slightly towards the end. The obvious choice for the cut is the nine-minute penultimate track A Dying Earth. It’s not weak at all, and would probably sit right at home on more of a standard post-metal record, but coming so late in the day and stretching across such a lengthy runtime it does lack some of the urgency of the eight tracks which precede it. Add to this the fact that closer Time plays even more effectively with dynamics across another sizable six minutes and you wonder if the band could’ve just skipped straight to this excellent final offering.
Ultimately though, The Decline is absolutely worth your time – even that long instrumental at least once or twice. At any given moment it may bring to mind one or two bands you’ve heard before, but those bands are invariably excellent, and with the influences thrown together as they are there should be no mistaking the end result for the work of anyone other than TURBID NORTH themselves. That alone is worth celebrating, even if it is hard to find a playlist to put them in.
Rating: 7/10
The Decline is set for release on January 20th via self-release.
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