EP REVIEW: Smog – Absorb

While Canada is perhaps most famous for its fantastic black metal underground at present, it’s important to note that the Great White North is notorious for producing brilliant bands from across the extreme metal spectrum, with some of the most interesting death metal acts in the genre’s history having come from there. ABSORB are one of the many bands within the Canadian underground that have been putting out excellent music over the last decade or so, with their first two albums – their self-titled 2015 debut and 2018’s Wormdust – establishing their punishing brand of death-doom with a monolithic and domineering sound that’s not a million miles away from the searing, pummelling aggression that has made PRIMTIVE MAN so effective and celebrated over the last few years. The band’s newest EP Smog is genuinely more visceral and belligerent over just three songs than some bands are able to be over the course of an entire album, and even surpasses ABSORB‘s own noxious benchmarks in the process.

Dissociated kicks things off with a coarse and ominous piece of bleak sludge, with thunderous, primal drumming, jarring guitars, tar thick bass lines and equally dense, forceful vocals all creating a foreboding and imposing slab of monolithic sound that immediately grabs the listener’s attention. Like a lot of the best sludge, it’s indebted to doom just as much as it is to elements of hardcore and extreme metal, meaning that the music never shifts out of a ponderous, mid-paced crawl, allowing the more acerbic side of the vocals to provide a good portion of the hooks and establishing a noxious atmosphere.

Smog adopts a more groove-laden approach that places a great emphasis on the guitars and bass, with the strained bark of the vocals and hypnotic, percussive drums providing a great backdrop to some incredibly meaty, rhythmic guitar work. This is a song that seems to get steadily harder and fiercer as it progresses, never fully embracing harsher noise into the mix, but certainly hinting at it as the song reaches its climax.

Cecillia, with its fuzzy bass tone and throaty vocals, possesses a similar, slow burning and primitive sound not unlike the EP’s opener, but carries forward a lot of the weighty, spartan musicianship on the preceding effort as well, creating a cavernous and domineering wall of sound that pummels the listener, rarely deviating from the dissonant cacophony, apart from some well placed, disjointed leads which only serve to make this even more abrasive. It’s a great song that brings the most visceral parts of this band’s style together, closing this EP on a bellicose and punishing note.

Unlike a lot of EPs which offer bands a chance to offload excess material they had lying around between album releases, this feels like a record that has been just as carefully considered as any of ABSORB‘s larger outings. It’s got a cohesive, monolithic sound that makes this feel like a huge, interconnected whole, whilst injecting enough variety into the mix to ensure that each of these three songs is impactful on its own merits, and more to the point, their brand of sludgy, death-doom sounds vastly different and harsher than the vast majority of their peers. It would be great to see the band finally release a third album after all these years, and if they can replicate the strength and calibre of songwriting that is present on Smog, they may very well produce their finest work to date and gain some of the wider recognition that they so thoroughly deserve.

Rating: 9/10

Smog is out now via Hypaethral Records.

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