By: Jamie Jones
Fórn | website | facebook | bandcamp |
Released on December 11, 2015 via Gilead Media
Weltschmerz is one of those wonderful compound words the German language has such an abundance of, which translates as ‘world-pain’ or world weariness. It was coined by the German author Jean Paul to describe a sort of ever present disappointment that reality can never live up to the ideals created within the mind. Which is a wonderful way of capturing music Fórn are responsible for – many doom bands aim for depressing, but few quite manage the kind of absolute hopelessness the Boston band create. The choice of song titles is impeccable too – Weltschmerz is made up of two two-part tracks, ‘Saudade’ (“a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia”) and ‘Dolor’ (“a state of great sorrow or distress”). Combined with the silver etching on black background artwork that adorns both this and last year’s debut full-length The Departure of Consciousness they’ve got a perfectly suited aesthetic which almost prepares you for what you’ll hear should you decide to step down into the void with them.
Almost.
It’s the space that makes it so desolate, so devoid of light and hope. Fórn aren’t ones to complicate things, to over clutter songs. They recognise the need for room for the hideously low rumble of fuzz to permeate into, like a drop of blood in water. On ‘Saudade (I)’ the guitar is given a great deal of space to crash and reverberate in, complemented by lead guitar lines drift and fade like they’re being sucked into a black hole and guttural vocals that sound like a man trying to hack up and spit out his own soul. It trudges at a sedate pace, like someone taking their last steps to a place they’re reluctant to go. It’s similar in sound and purpose to Bell Witch only somehow even more bleak, and with a preference for brevity over 20 minute epics. The second part of ‘Saudade’ is a more meditative piece that leans towards post rock and black metal. It sounds like a funeral procession for the whole humanity, one that threatens to erupt with grief at any moment. But it withholds any sort of climax; the drums never come. It’s an exercise in tension without release.
The two parts of ‘Dolor’ follow the same pattern – a full band track that aggressively slouches towards some kind of terrible end followed by an instrumental piece. The first part drops the pace even further from ‘Saudade’, with colossal slow handed riffery and brutally simplistic drumming, hammering like waves laying siege to the rocks, eroding rather than destroying, the vocals occasionally lifting themselves to an inhuman yelp of pain. Even when it comes to life a couple of minutes in it still moves like a reanimated corpse shambling towards a live body to feed on. ‘Dolor (II)’ is another instrumental coda, a long elegiac funereal composition of distortion and mournful guitar ringing out like a long, slow fall into the abyss.
Fórn aren’t for the faint of heart. It’s doom in the very purest sense of the word; an unshakable sense of dread, a gnawing feeling that everything is somehow fundamentally, irredeemably wrong. It’s sludge you have to wade neck deep through. It’s an EP that will make you feel like painting the windows black, cutting the phoneline, giving all your possessions bar your stereo away and existing entirely within its cavernous chords. “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.” Sartre once said. Fórn probably think that sounds unduly optimistic.
