CLOUDS TASTE SATANIC ~ THE GLITTER OF INFINITE HELL ....review

Not many doom bands can pull off instrumental music, doom just by it's very nature is a genre defined by its lyrical tales of despair and desolation married to repetitious riffage and incessant plodding rhythms and is not the sort of sound that easily lends itself to vocal-less soundscapes.
Brooklyn's Clouds Taste Satanic, however. have built a career doing just that, the band releasing three albums of crushing psych laced instrumental doom, "To Sleep Beyond The Earth"(2014), "Your Doom Has Come"(2015) and "Dawn of the Satanic Age" (2016), along the way. The band return this year with another collection of mind blowing slow, low and heavy instrumental grooves flying under the collective title "The Glitter of Infinite Hell" (due for release 31st October 2017)

"The Glitter of Infinite Hell" consists of four one word titled songs, a list of deadly sins for a new age, that begins with "Greed" a song that opens with slow deliberate riffage reverberating over heavy pounding percussion enhanced by soaring guitar colouring that is reminiscent, to this listeners ears, of the opening bars to, 70's prog giants, ELP's "Knife-Edge" albeit considerably slower and a lot more menacing. The song then wends and winds its way along dark musical paths holding the listeners attention by shifting through a variety of differing dynamics and musical colourings, its core base of doom drenched riffage enhanced by soaring, tasteful guitar solo's, before resuming its initial refrain to take things to a close. "Treachery" follows and begins with a low slow bass line  played over  tinkling, shimmering percussion that is slowly joined by the bands two guitarists, the four musicians combining to take the song on a myriad of ever shifting crunching doom drenched and psychedelic tinted tangents before finally finishing in a deliriously superb, and frankly quite surprising, blues groove. "Violence" rears its head next and like its title suggests is an epic tome informed by pummelling percussion and vicious refrains but also by moments of simmering moody ambiance that perfectly reflect both musically and dynamically the emotional ebb and flow of its subject matter. "Wrath" closes the album and finds Clouds Taste Satanic in classic stoner doom mode jamming a crunching mid-paced groove replete with scorching heavily effected guitar solo's, the band coming across in places like Sleep on acid. As shown on previous tracks Clouds Taste Satanic are not a band to allow one riff to dictate a groove and so mix things up a little with clever uses of dynamics and time signatures to add an extra level of depth and intensity to grooves that it has to be said are already quite deep and intense to begin with.

If album cover artwork is a reflection of the music contained therein then Clouds Taste Satanic's choice of an Hieronymus Bosh inspired painting by an uncredited artist for "The Glitter of Infinite Hell" is a masterstroke and one that speaks volumes about what lies inside. Doom both musically. lyrically and visually has long been associated with themes inspired by the darker side of the religious spectrum but these themes have often been found to have an almost cartoonish, even at times comedic feel to them, a feeling that the bands in question are just playing with those themes, however this is not the case with Clouds Taste Satanic. There is a feeling, while listening to the four instrumental songs that make up the album, that if Clouds Taste Satanic were to add vocals to their huge musical tomes then the lyrics for those vocals would be some of the darkest, most thought provoking and disturbing ever committed to tape however until/if that time ever arrives you can just... check out the jams....

© 2017 Frazer Jones