Having been around in some guise since the late 90s, Clint Listing has steadily plugged away in the US noise underground, collaborating with the likes of Kadaver and Ordo Tyrannis, as well as running his own Dragon Flight Recordings label, but his recent work as The Slumbering might be one of his crowning achievements. Operating as a one-man ‘noise doom’ machine, these works are haunting and claustrophobic but contain a sense of structure and atmosphere that often gets neglected the more one dives into the darker recesses of the psyche. The Loss Of Humanity Complete, his fourth release under this moniker, depicts the extinction of humanity not as a tragedy but as a blessing in disguise, a cessation of pain to be embraced and mourned in equal measure; its five tracks are like going through the stages of grief for humanity as a whole, messy and turbulent but ultimately fulfilling.
The album is bookended by two monolithic cuts that exist at either end of the doom spectrum. ‘Dreams Are Not Always Pleasant’ is twelve minutes of ambient drone, a soothing sound bath of crackling distortion and the gentle rattle of cymbals that drift and hover, an ash cloud of noise that envelops the listener with a disquieting sense of stillness. It’s a subtle start but as Listing’s voice moans and sighs with the melancholy of a wraith, it conjures images of vast, empty cities, the beauty of extinction already beginning to shine through. At the opposite end, ‘Belief In Social Doctrines’ is industrial-tinged doom, each chord buckling under the weight of so much rust, rubble and accumulated pain. Vocals are a cavernous groan, as distorted and ominous as the composition that it frames, and as the song continues it creaks and fractures on the hinterland of doom, noise and absolute sonic misanthropy, a genuinely claustrophobic listening experience.
It would have been easy to bridge these two extremes with a natural descent into gloom and despair but the three shorter cuts that constitute the album’s core are a choppier affair, and slightly more interesting for that. ‘Chapel Of The Damned’, the record’s first single, is a grimy chunk of Stygian sludge, a crawling riff that sound like early Melvins soundtracking the worst trip imaginable forming the basis for the feel bad hit of the summer; ‘Sinister Expressions’ pushes firmly into dark ambient territory, electronic pulsations and faint traces of voice not exactly going anywhere but instead creating an atmosphere that evokes neither dread nor loss, just dusty nothingness; and ‘Shadow Realm’ building on that atmosphere, adding touches of light and shade, the occasional shimmer of synth bringing into sharper focus the barren and desiccated landscape that Listing has been gradually weaving from shadow and skeletal melody.
As with much of Listing’s output, this is not an album for everyone but then again, the subject matter itself doesn’t lend itself to easy listening. It’s an ominous and often unsettling collection that stresses minimalism yet isn’t afraid to simply drown the listener in distortion and filth when the right moment presents itself. In times as dark as these it can be tempting to use any means necessary to escape the misery but this teaches us that it can be just as therapeutic to confront the horrors of humanity with an open heart.
