Lurk, according to their press release, don’t like tags. Happily SonicAbuse doesn’t like tags either as they smack of journalistic laziness, so we shall happily oblige the Finnish loons responsible for this ugly racket by offering them none. What we will say is that Lurk aptly exemplify their name, for theirs is an exquisitely lurid brand of heaviness that loiters in the shadows, occasionally bursting forth into the light to scare the bejesus out of some lone and unsuspecting sole before vanishing back into the murk from whence it came. Indeed, even Doomentia’s press writers, who must surely by now have a strong stomach for this sort of monstrous invocation of evil, end the short and sweet press release with the words ‘enter ‘Kaldera’ at your own peril’ and it is fair warning indeed, for ‘Kaldera’ is liable to flay your senses with its furious riffs, molten vocals and occasionally psychedelic overtones.
Opening with what sounds like the song of a tortured whale but what is, in fact, the squeal of an abused guitar, ‘below flesh’ is a monumentally heavy slab of grinding metal that sounds like Black Sabbath duelling with Kyuss and High on Fire in a dungeon dripping with the foetid remains of untold victims. Inhuman vocals crawl out of the scabrous darkness, ridden with sores and rent with the lash of the whip, whilst the guitars flicker and tear with unhinged fury. It’s one hell of an opening and doom fans will be in raptures over the band’s unholy sound. ‘Lorn’ opens on a grimly hypnotic note, all sinister guitar tempered with demonic restraint and swollen bass before a riff flares up from the pits of hell itself, crashing into the listener’s consciousness like a brick through a plate glass window. ‘Ritual’ , at seven minutes one of the longest songs on the album, draws a line between doom and post-rock, ending up in a dark hinterland where the dead roam the earth, pitted with sores and festering wounds. A blackened incantation, it requires strong nerves to listen with the lights turned low and it exemplifies the savage uniqueness of Lurk’s remorselessly ugly sound. ‘Six feet, six years’ has a wide sonic palette that suggests that Lurk are as familiar with chamber music as they are with Swans as hallucinatory guitar slithers over warm but unsettling strings. It highlights the variation that lies at the heart of Lurk’s success and it subverts the beauty of orchestral music, twisting the strings into just another form of aural torment with which to unsettle the listener.
With the album hitting the half-way point, ‘sag serene’ is Lurk at their most listeneable, the track opening with a heavy drum and bass groove that has you nodding your head even as you wait for the inevitable shift into cataclysmic riffs and deathly vocals. ‘Rest unitaries’ steps into pure horror territory, recalling the festering fear of a Dario Argento movie with its muttered vocals and slow-motion grind. As a result of the previous track’s unprecedented levels of menace, the searing feedback of short, sharp shock to the system ‘cutting’ comes as something of a relief with its monumentally huge riff and colossal percussive battering. However, the band save the best for last with the epic length title track, a nine-minute odyssey into the very heart of madness with Clive Barker at the wheel and Tony Iommi providing the soundtrack. It sums up everything that is cool about the album and leaves the listener feverish and on edge.
Lurk are perfectly named. They exist in the shadows and are born of darkness, their sound a filthy overspill of the dungeon sewer, rife with disease and a grim portent of what is to come. Their music is ugly, sonically challenging and gloriously brutal, juxtaposing scarred, deathly vocals against the most nihilistic strain of doom imaginable. Recommended for fans of Reverend Bizarre, Neurosis and Electric Wizard, this is dark music for those who sit brooding late into the night with malicious intent. Unhealthy, unholy and unhinged, this is a fantastically nasty slab of pitch black metal that should be mandatory listening for anyone with a love of metal at its darkest. Unconditionally recommended, Lurk are awesome – who needs tags when that’s your epithet?!
