Eremit – Carrier Of Weight – Album Review
For fans of Bell Witch, Thou, Mournful Congregation and Jupiterian....
An expansive, restless, hypnotic, endless bludgeoning of beautiful, doom/sludge inflected noise, the term ‘atmospheric’ doesn’t come close to describing the unnerving – yet strangely alluring – sounds which emerge from Eremit‘s debut album, Carrier Of Weight.
Weighty this most certainly is, and with opening track “Dry Land” clocking in at a bum-numbing 23 minutes you’d better hope that these guys ‘carry that weight’ well…….and carry it, they most certainly do!
What we have here is suffocatingly intense doom metal broken down into three chapters of increasing power, best described by the band themselves:
? Chapter One: Dry Land
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai-YpM0pXXg
All he ever knew was this sea. This horizon. This ongoing bi-polar stream of sky and clouds above, and an endless mass of water underneath him and within this vast and measureless waterscape he traveled. Without grasps of time or space he traveled on his vessel. He was following a course his father had shown him, just as his father’s father had shown his father. A direction that should lead to the promised land, Dry Land. All his life he had followed this course and had never left it. Ongoing…
? Chapter Two: Froth is Beckoning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfQCmk35TCc
“I was born on the water. I was raised on the water. All I ever knew, all I ever loved, or hated, or possessed or lost, all of it came from the water. And so I became water, too.”
? Chapter Three: Cocoon of Soul
https://youtu.be/rVSG2GJ5TNk
The sky was amazingly blue and there was bright light. When his consciousness returned to his body and soul he found himself in the most quiet sea-space. The sea lay in absolute silence before him. The surface of the water was still and not interrupted by a single wave. His boat stood still in this unreal frozen-like scene. The storm was gone and it almost seemed as it had never been, as this sight was too peaceful, too calm, to imagine such a storm ever happening.
Ambitious, eh!
Fortunately, Eremit have succeeded in their endeavours and delivered a debut of immense proportions. This is doom metal designed for the most courageous of travellers and inhabits the same realms stalked by Bell Witch, Thou, Mournful Congregation and Jupiterian. As opposed to the traditional likes of Candlemass, Trouble, Saint Vitus and Black Sabbath, Eremit are nastier, more subversive and, fundamentally, a far scarier proposition.
A monolithic beast that lives and dies by its sheer balk, Eremit’s Carrier Of Weight is a compelling tome well worth diving into! 8/10
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