2 posts tagged “ks”

It's pretty rare that I get something sent to me by a band I've never heard of that I like enough to order on vinyl immediately after listening to it (despite having a full CD copy already). Life's Trade by Samothrace (of Lawrence, Kansas) is an album I just couldn't resist (especially that nice gold vinyl they've got up at 20 Buck Spin's website in very limited quantities - 150 copies). Combining the best parts of old-school and new-school doom sounds, this is probably one of the more original records to come out of a genre that, frankly, was starting to feel frustratingly stagnant despite the glaringly unexplored possibilities.

So onto the sound. It's slow. It's got a bit of a drone thing going on. But there are riffs. There's interplay. There's lead guitar! There are guitar solos! The vocals serve almost more as ambience than they do as anything explicitly lyrical (although the lyrics are great, especially by metal standards), most of the time mixed down just below the point of clarity. There's a sort of post-rock-y sense of song structure, with songs building to crescendos rather than choruses. These things come together to make Samothrace one of the most exciting doom bands I've heard in a long time.

One thing I'm really thankful for is that this band has a good sense of when to break down into a quiet section. And they do this really tastefully. Despite being pretty clearly influenced by Agalloch and their contemporaries, there are no corny cleanly sung vocals or any of that junk (no disrespect intended to Agalloch, who are awesome, by the way). Just a quiet, contemplative moment in the song.

Also, the guitar solos here are surprisingly competent and bring to mind a more classic doom metal sound. While I've always gotten the feeling that a lot of bands playing doom metal recently were... uh... less than stellar musicians, I don't get that feeling at all, here. The guitar solos are tastefully executed, and yet show a degree of musicianship that many bands in the genre are sorely lacking.