Clouds Taste Satanic | facebook | bandcamp |
Released on May 1, 2014 via Independent
Now, this band comes with an interesting bit of background information. After they initially started as a post-rock band, Clouds Taste Satanic then decided to change musical direction and focus on instrumental doom instead. To some people these two genres are quite far apart from each other, but if you consider the atmospheric elements many doom bands, and also many black metal and post-metal bands, incorporate into their music, there is a lot more overlap between the post-rock and metal subgenres than you might initially think. But throughout this epic one track release, entitled To Sleep Beyond The Earth, Clouds Taste Satanic never really leave their post-rock origin in the past as there are plenty of passages where the typical post-rock atmospheric elements come to the foreground.
This four piece hails from Brooklyn, New York and To Sleep Beyond The Earth is definitely a recommended listen to fans of heavy instrumental music, such as Bongripper. However, and I’m honest with you here, it took me a bunch of spins to come to this conclusion as upon the first listen I wasn’t overly impressed. Perhaps it’s the fact we were absolutely spoilt rotten with various top shelf doom releases last year that I raised my expectations too much, but To Sleep Beyond The Earth is what we call a grower. Give it time, give it a few listens and you’ll start to appreciate the song structures and discover some of its beautiful passages.
To Sleep Beyond The Earth is one long track of 45 minutes length, which is split into 4 parts, making it fit nicely on a single vinyl pressing. The strength of this release is its simplicity as the band plays not too complicated riffs on repetition and adds to that those post-rock sounding guitar layers with plenty of reverb and delay effects, thereby creating a very relaxing and almost hypnotic listening experience.
The only bit of criticism I have has to do with the production as I think it misses a bit of ‘beef’ as I like my instrumental doom to sound very heavy, with big pounding drums and riffs that crunch into your ears. To Sleep Beyond The Earth sounds a bit too clean and perhaps too safe, and I think if the band works on that for their next release they could be onto a real winner. I do want to give Clouds Taste Satanic plenty of credit for releasing an album that would appeal to fans of both the post-rock and doom genres and could hopefully bridge these genres a bit closer towards each other.
