Old Man Gloom | facebook | bandcamp |
Released on November 11, 2014 via Profound Lore Records
There’s an air of the carnivalesque to Old Man Gloom—an air of humor and chaos combined. Like the grinning Shakespearean fool who serves ultimately as a figure of sorrow, Old Man Gloom masquerade as pranksters even as they despair at the basic depravity of our species. Many bands strive for a balance between merrymaking and regime wrecking; here is a band that actually attains it. Armed with a caustic disposition and an unusually high pedigree—the band shares members with Converge, Cave In and the late, great Isis—Old Man Gloom gleefully ape and eclipse pretty much everything else going on today in the flourishing nooks of sludge, doom, hardcore and ambient.
A few months ago, Old Man Gloom announced a new album, The Ape Of God, to be out in November. A track— ‘The Lash’ —was issued as a preview; a promo copy was distributed to the press; and a number of the Internet’s otherwise sedate, slack-jawed music writers, I among them, went bananas. And with good reason—Ape would be the sixth album in an output that already boasted several singular and addictive releases, including 2012’s NO and 2004’s Christmas. Like those records, the Ape promo was heavy, spacious, unsettling and dismissive of genre lines. Early reviews even said as much.
Then, a week before the record’s November 11th release date, the band posted the following to its Facebook page:
Guess what, assholes. The Ape Of God is two entirely different albums. If you downloaded some leaked shit, you don’t have either. You have some bogus version we gave to the press, cuz we knew those jerks would leak it . . . We will always trick you. We will always trick you. We will always trick you.
Two weeks later, and this is where things stand: The Ape Of God is not one but two individual albums that have identical titles and nearly identical cover art. The only features that would distinguish them in a record store are the tracklists, the back covers and the serial numbers on the spines. For their part, online stores and music software tend to call the album that has eight tracks The Ape Of God I and the album that has four tracks The Ape Of God II. And the “bogus” version? It hosts truncated and reordered tracks from both I and II—so, actual music from the albums—and plays at half the real pair’s 90-minute runtime.
As you might have gathered from the tone of that Facebook post, Old Man Gloom have been decidedly unapologetic about the episode. (If it still has you confused, Stereogum’s Michael Nelson details the hijinks more articulately in this article). Whatever it was—publicity stunt, attention whoring, anti-piracy ploy—one thing is for certain: cranky ol’ Old Man Gloom re-established the album release as an event that is genuinely, well, fun.
Does such levity fly in the face of the actual music? Not really. Ape’s hymns to barbarism call for a rejection of the dualities that are established in Western civilization: fear and love; divine and profane; wisdom and folly. So a teasing rollout for a profound album—there’s no contradiction there. More to the point, Old Man Gloom’s is the rare case wherein the sounds outstrip the antics.
The Ape Of God, recorded and mixed by Converge’s Kurt Ballou at God City Studios in Massachusetts, is an exceptionally cohesive work. Given the benefit of innovative structures, the atmospheric passages and the “heavy” passages are of equal weight. Songs build (‘Simia Dei’, ‘The Lash’) and decay (‘Predators’) on a seeming whim, like shreds of tone flapping in an arid wind.
I and II are cut from the same ragged cloths, but each holds to its own dominant theme. I heaves in dynamic exhortation to violence; II lurches through pained meditations on human fragility. Like Swans’ Soundtracks for the Blind, this is music at its most grotesque.
We are lucky to have Old Man Gloom. They laugh and hold a mirror to our mangled world, the reflected image that of primates draped in garbs and playacting at enlightenment. They do this with the festive irreverence of a street performer. But what we would mistake for masks in Old Man Gloom’s terrifying presentation are in fact naked human faces, rubbed raw and animal. Their latest offering exposes and exalts humanity’s primal nature in a chest-pounding, soul-stirring display. The Ape Of God is no joke.
