Working in the corporate world, I'm really bored of philistines with their powerpoint presentations using this term, but Unearthly Trance really have carved a niche in the doom metal genre. Seriously, even though they get lumped with the extreme doom/sludge bands in the scene, more so because they tour together, these guys have an undeniable early 80s influenced sound going on. If you're a fan of Celtic Frost and Venom and are really big on doom, this is a band that brings it all together for you. With this established, the band are always redefining themselves and coming up with albums always better than the previous ones.

2008's Electrocution is no exception. With an amazing modern-in-a-good-way artwork and slick layout packaged in a nifty digipack, the album is just plain astonishing after a month's heavy rotation. With the punk-paced Celtic/Venom influenced angle always in tandem with slow dirgy doom sound of theirs, the band keeps it interesting with further refined songwriting and their superlative delivery, powered by glorious sounding fuzzy guitars, distorted bass, and often pounding tribal drums with tried and tested anti-religion/god lyrics and visuals. Fantastic production too.

I must mention, there's going to be a song like Diseased, which renders all my attempts at pigeonholing their sound futile, with its clean arpeggiated chords and clean singing parts (done surprisingly well too). Vocals are supplied by the guitarist Rion Lipynsky and he seems to do the percussive screams often with intonation, and with clean singing every now and then, things are always very powerful. He'd occasionally come across sounding like a southern sludge guy too.

My picks of the album are in the second half. Burn You Insane is your text book Unearthly Trance song and would be a perfect track to have a newbie start off with. Added bonus would be the cool noisy outro.

The album closer Distant Roads Overgrown boasts two of the best riffs of the album. The band goes nuts around the 4 minute mark with the drummer  going all 70s on us with his rolls, and guitars doing the noise-feedback thing, before doing their most ferocious and thrashy bit on the album yet. Of course, it all slows down to our typical doom pace, but then the band would do those pounding drums again accompanying the clean guitars and then get to that awesome heavy-as-fuck riff once more. Another lesson in great dynamics in songwriting. It's clearly over the eight minute mark before the noisy indulgence of an outro kicks in, but it certainly doesn't feel so. Longest song of the album, but the whole damn thing is cool like that. Not an easy listen, but this is their best yet.

Screw the naysayers, Relapse is still putting out good albums every year.



Year of Release: 2008
Label: Relapse