As England basks in a heat-wave, BBQs everywhere are unleashed, undoubtedly leading to a vast spike in air pollution (and thus global warming), and sweaty gentlemen eschew their tops so as to better worship the warm yellow God (and greatly increase their chances of skin cancer along the way) we can be grateful that bands such as Horse Latitudes exist to summon the clouds no matter how high the outside temperature may climb.
‘Awakening’, clad in a black sleeve with only a deep, dark red pyramid quietly burned into it and released on the excellent and gloriously reliable Doomentia records, is the sonic equivalent of a mud bath – music to wallow to, music to stick to the skin and cleanse the pores, and, of course, music to firmly banish the sun and, more importantly, that inane sense of cheerfulness that goes hand in hand with it.
Of course, hailing from Helsinki, maybe Horse Latitudes just find the sunshine hellishly annoying (round about now they have 18 hellish hours of the stuff) and so one can easily imagine that this devilish three-piece (one drummer, two bassists, don’t ask) spend much of the summer months occupying some Barker-esque underworld, all dank water dripping from arched vaults and flyblown meat lying untouched on candle-lit tables… or maybe I’ve been listening to this too long and it’s started to have an effect… one can never really be sure.
Either way, ‘Awakening’ has a bare six songs (albeit clocking in at 47 minutes) and the sound is one of slowed-down, hypnotic torment that at higher volumes threatens to bring the very foundations of your house to the surface, splintered and blackened as the building implodes around you. Opening ‘preparation’ is aptly named with its Khanate-styled sludge dribbling down around you, summoning the blackness as if someone has emptied a bucket of tar upon the windows and it is slowly dribbling down, blocking out the life-giving light and replacing it with the obsidian blackness that appears in ‘Dissolution’. If the rules state that a band must have a guitarist, no one told Horse Latitudes, because the sound – oppressive, sinister and strangely melodic – is missing nothing and you wonder that more bands haven’t attempted the same. ‘Dissolution’ which segues out of its predecessor and storms into life without so much as a ‘by-your-leave’ is a chaotic, blackened trawl into the very mouth of insanity. With the music slowed down to a monumental trudge, the bass resonating deep inside you so that your very bones begin to throb in time to the music and the percussion a model of tempered restraint, when the lyrics do arrive they are delivered in a multi-layered Neurosis-esque world-weary drawl. It is not easy music and like all such traumatic renderings of turmoil it requires utter surrender on the part of the listener to get the most out of it, but aficionados of the genre will gladly give this given the quality of the music on offer.
Having rendered you their slave for the remaining thirty-odd minutes, Horse Latitudes are now ready to fully destroy any sense of well-being you may have retained with ‘profane awakening’, a terrifying epic that opens with echoing drums stolen straight from Moria and the slithery bass lines that crawl across and erode the percussion will tell you that you are trapped with something truly monstrous. ‘Decline of the ages’ is better still – a torturous cross between the sheer sonic might of Sunn 0))), the overwhelming misery of My Dying Bride and the psychedelic sludge of Neurosis – it is an album highlight and with the ground so well and truly prepared by the previous three tracks, you’re hardly in a state to resist, particularly as the final minute picks up to a almost-brisk pace that threatens to strip the very paint from the walls so unexpected is its savagery.
If the album, to this point, has piqued your interest, it is ‘into the deep’ which forms the album’s dark heart. At some twelve and a half minutes it is the longest song here, and the drawn-out riffs make even that seem twice as long as it really is… which, in case you’re not sure, is a good thing. This is sludge/doom amped up to the nth degree, the intrinsic power of the genre crafted into a track that has all the and gravity of a collapsing star – don’t try to escape it, it will only draw the process out more painfully, instead submit to its slow-moving tide of despair and wallow in its barely-contained sense of dread, the closest relative of which is surely ‘black sabbath’ with its figures in black appearing before you in stony silence and engendering a feeling of extreme agitation. The final track, ‘along the circles’ does not, as such, offer sonic balm after the nightmarish, hallucinatory experiences of its predecessor, but it does offer a suitably hypnotic close, that brings the whole feverish record to an end leaving you soaked with sweat and harbouring lingering feelings of an un-nameable, intangible fear which, for all its ethereal qualities, still feels to close for comfort.
That this record will appeal to a small section of music fans goes without saying (despite the fact that I have… err, said it) but for those fans who see doom as one of the few ‘pure’ genres, uncorrupted by corporate greed and market forces, Horse Latitudes will reinforce your faith in the power of dark music to fundamentally alter your world vies. Dark, powerful, haunting and memorable, this is an excellent record indeed. All hail Horse Latitudes, the new lords of darkness.
