ALBUM REVIEW: The Room – Night Gaunt

Rome’s NIGHT GAUNT are a band that pay homage to classic doom metal bands with their sound, without having to rely on tired lyrical or musical cliches in order to do so. The band have been fairly prolific in their native Italy as a live act over the last few years, with a record coming out every couple of years to keep their fans taste for new music satiated. Their latest record, The Room, builds on the solid foundations laid down on their self titled 2014 album and 2016’s Jupiter’s Fall, and results in an album that has one foot firmly in an old school doom sound, with bombastic, dramatic and palpable atmosphere and some slight suggestions that they are looking to expand their scope of their sound.

The opening, titular track is a slow, crawling and morose piece of bleak, traditional doom with some dense, moaning guitar hooks, steady, pounding drums and haunted, soaring vocals that sets a dark and eerie tone right away. The track doesn’t change too much throughout it’s running time, until what sounds like a flute is introduced towards the songs closing moments. It’s a great offering on which to open this record, minimal and measured, but still ghoulish and epic.

Penance is a great song, with groove-laden guitar hooks, a thick, bubbling bass and primal percussion all setting a macabre tone for the song, which is counterpointed by the glorious quality of the vocals, which again carve through the impenetrable power of the music and immediately grab the listeners attention. Musically, this is very reminiscent of a band like REVEREND BIZARRE, without straying into the realms of outright imitation. The song takes a much more intense and aggressive turn as it progresses, with the pace quickening, the guitars getting all the more oppressive in their darkness, and even the vocals taking on a harsher, more visceral air.

The third track on the record, Oval Portrait, makes great use of softer, cleaner guitar tones to set a sepulchral, hair-raising tone that sets it apart from the two songs that came before. This is a brilliant slab of grandiose, tar thick doom metal with some more primitive rhythmic elements that help to create a funereal and misty atmosphere for the song. The vocals, bombastic and at points anguished, help paint a great picture to go with the music, and provide plenty of hooks of their own, drawing the listener in and creating an utterly engrossing feel that really propels this track from being a decent one to a great one.

Veil, with it’s crunching, ferocious guitars, prominent bass hooks and far more intricate and lively drumming patterns, proves to be one of the albums more vicious moments. There’s a strong, crushing feeling to this track that which makes the music in particular sound all the more fierce and venomous. There’s plenty of impressive and imaginative hooks on here, and the vocals ebb and flow between sonorous, almost gothic lows through to vast, angelic highs. It’s a short sharp shock of aggression that works incredibly well at this point on the record.

Labyrinth, the albums penultimate track, is a long, sprawling track with some incredibly solid musicianship and some surprising energetic, bestial moments. It’s a grim and foreboding affair, with some truly sharp, powerful riffs and world class, emotional charged vocals. The singing on this track really sounds brilliant, and does a lot to add to the eldritch atmosphere of the track, and rises and falls with the increase and decline of the intensity of the music. The song is clearly building to a dark and macabre crescendo, and it’s hard not to get completely engrossed in the music. It eventually dies away on a thick, sludgy bass line, after the track has reached its cacophonous crescendo. The Owl, the sixth and final track on this record, slides out of the speakers at a relative dirge, with massive chords and primitive drumming building a huge sound tinged with epic flourishes. It’s a really good, solid track, but unfortunately doesn’t really possess that climactic quality that the last track on an album should have until quite late in the song, but nonetheless, it proves to be a great way to bring the album to an end.

This is quite an impressive record from start to finish. Each of these six songs that NIGHT GAUNT present is rooted in a classic doom sound, without having to rely on cliches or imitating the sound and style of other bands. The musicianship is tight and sounds incredibly thick, and manages to provide enough variety on a tried and tested sound to maintain the listeners attention throughout. The vocals, in particular, on this record are amazing, and are at many points evocative of Messiah Marcolin at his peak, and at certain points on the record carry some of the tracks from being good tracks to great ones. If you like traditional doom with an epic and powerful edge, this is an album that is well worth seeking out.

Rating: 8/10

The Room is out now via Terror Of Hell Records.

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