After several ep’s and a split album, the Scots Of Spire & Throne finally decide to release their first full length, seriously endangering the sanity of their potential listeners with a sludge doom that even the definition of “pachydermic” is a bit narrow. The muddy and caliginous side of the genre is here brought to the extreme consequences but everything, almost magically, during its short hour of duration manages to never get bored, thanks to a rough and spontaneous impact that will cause at most some headaches due to the heavy swinging of the skull box and all its noble content. Here every note is lowered and distorted to the nth power but, thanks to the production of Chris Fielding and the mastering of James Plotkin, the sound is perfectly commensurate with the warlike intentions of the band from Edinburgh (of course, if you are looking for sounds licked pass over anyway): three very long tracks (the fourth, Fathom, is slightly shorter and experimental traits, but no less pernicious), in which emerges from time to time a voice that does not portend anything reassuring, nail the listener to the chair exhibiting without mediation the fruit of years of excavation within the most putrid recesses. In the end there is not much more to tell about this monolithic work, able to obscure in a moment even the most bucolic scenarios: each riff is a nail driven into the flesh with methodical slowness, and we masochistically are not satisfied, wishing that the torment continues indefinitely. During some (presumed) glimmers of lucidity I thought that if Lee Dorrian and Gary Jennings had not already been in the initial phase of their psychedelic trip, maybe Forest Of Equilibrium would have sounded very similar to Sanctum In The Light, for sure as heaviness this work is not less, even if in that case we are talking about a milestone of the genre: but it’s not that Of Spire & Throne are so far away, try to believe.
2015 – Aesthetic Death
Mournful Sounds 
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