Monnos --- Conan -- 2012 (Burning World Records)
Recommended by Mojo and bob
According to their entry in
EM these guys include the likes of Viking and Norse mythology in their lyrics. If that’s the case I should be off to a good start here. After a few EPs and a split with Slomatics the previous year, this is the first proper album from stoner/doom metal band Conan, although they have a new one out this year. An English outfit, they're based out of Liverpool, but I would guess they have more in common with beetles than Beatles! Interestingly, perhaps sounding a note of alarm, the lyric sheet to this album seems to show each song consists of barely a few lines each, with some of them simply made up of one-word sentences. But we’ll get to that soon enough.
There are only six tracks, with none particularly epic --- the longest, the closer, clocks in at nine minutes --- so this should in effect not take too long. Which is good as I’m ready to go to bed now, but want to squeeze one more in before I retire. Oh, you cheeky devil!
A seriously downtuned guitar gets us started, plodding along at a pace that ensures one would never break, nor even endanger, one’s neck. Slow, crashing drums join the guitar, so low that it almost sounds like the low rumble of a very slow motorbike. Guess this is what they call Sludge? The vocal, when it comes in, is distant and almost moaning, to some degree a little lke someone who’s being forced to say or sing something they don’t want to: I don’t hear any passion here. Maybe that’s what this subgenre is like? The lyric consists of nine sentences, three of which are
”These skies are dead.” So’s my initial interest in this, mate!
Can’t say I’m enjoying this. Very dreary, very slow, very very boring. Things get a little faster (though not too much) for the “Battle in the swamp”, which this time has eight sentences, plus
Under the water” repeated four times at the end. Not real big believers in sweating it on the lyrics department, Conan, are they? Swirling wind noises and a shuddering guitar introduce “Grim tormentor”, with a sort of mid-paced feel to it, while “Golden axe” is a six-minute instrumental that not surprisingly, given what I’ve heard here, crawls along at an agonisingly slow rate. It’s nice, in its way, but so slow it’s almost like hearing someone learn to play a guitar. Slowly.
Good percussion joining in, and if I had to pick a favourite this might be it, what I’ve said notwithstanding. It has a certain atmosphere that’s hard to pin down. I could see it being beefed up with synth or piano or dark violin but … none of that happened of course. Another crushing hard grinder in “Headless hunter”, which has exactly six lines in the lyric, none of which are any more than three words long, most are two. A long, plodding instrumental intro runs for almost three of the near-to eight minutes the song runs for, then when the vocal does come in it really doesn’t change the song that much. And now we’re into the closer, “Invincible throne”, without me even realising the track has changed.
This is nine minutes long, very very slow and its lyric almost consists entirely of one-word sentences, of which there are a total of twenty in the song. Talk about a minimalist approach! Kind of more life, or a little more life, in the vocal here, though not much. Touches of defiance, triumph and pride in the singing, but it’s hard for me to get excited about anything on this album. Just too damn slow.
TRACKLISTING
1. Hawk as weapon
2. Battle in the swamp
3. Grim tormentor
4. Golden axe
5. Headless hunter
6. Invincible throne
Like grindcore, it would seem that Sludge Metal is somethng I won’t be getting into, if it’s all like this. I tell you, I’m ready for some speed metal after that. It’s not that it was bad, just really not my sort of thing at all. Bring on the Slayerfest!
Speaking of which...