Unearthly Trance
Electrocution
Relapse
Has a real rain come?
The new album from wailing souls Unearthly Trance doesn’t sound electrocuted so much as straight-up burnt, like you should scrape it with a knife before listening. Earbud-destroying distortion envelops everything from frontman Ryan Lipynsky to the guitars, as these begrimed New York doom boys turn black metal’s showers of fuzz into the kind of heavy weather that will send you running to the storm cellar.
Lipynsky may reside in the city that never sleeps, but he just as often sounds like he’s bellowing from a mountaintop in the face of a blizzard. Though I guess he could be hanging from the spire of a skyscraper. In a torrential downpour. Which fits, because a few BM tempo blasts like “The Dust Will Never Settle” aside, this is music that moves with the grace and gait of Kong.
Each of the nine slabs on Electrocution have something to recommend, but the album works best as a bleakly enveloping whole. The production’s super-loud but appropriately murky, even if the ride cymbal’s distractingly high in the mix; the band’s picked up a good line in mausoleum atmosphere from old pal Stephen O’Malley, while the knuckle-dragging beats and down-with-holy-rollers lyrics (“God is a beast!” and so on) keep things more mosh pit than art gallery. The guitars are just as likely to creepily drone (the album ends with minute upon minute of bleak ambience) as riff outright, but the rhythm section almost always hits like a gut-punch from a drunken Brooklyn longshoreman who’s just been pink-slipped. All very fitting for a band that talks much affectionate smack about their gritty native city. —Jess Harvell
