Welcome to Demo:listen, your weekly peek into the future of underground metal. Whether it’s death, grind, black, doom, sludge, heavy, progressive, stoner, retro, post-, etc. we’re here to bring you the latest demos from the newest bands. On this week’s Demo:listen, we plunge headlong into the seething maelstrom and find ourselves radically changed on the other side with San Diego’s Tideless.
Tideless
If you’re wondering where Tideless got their subtly evocative name then, like me, you’ve got some homework to do. According to Arturo Gaitan, Tideless’ guitarist: “. . . it comes from the song ‘My Tideless Seas’ by The Chasm, off their second album From the Lost Years…” Which album Gaitain considers “a masterpiece,” by the way, calling it the “most emotion-packed album within the realm of death-doom.” Which is something that too few contemporary death-doom bands have: emotion. Seems like heart, moodiness even, was once a prerequisite for the subgenre, but has since been trimmed off like so much fat in favor of lesser important aspects of death-doom’s glory days. Not so with Tideless. As Gaitan puts it: “Tideless is what the end should be. At peace, with nothing to alter it. . . . While our music consists of mid-paced death metal, there is also tons of black metal influence in it. I had a tough time siding with one or another. Death-doom or black-doom. I figured people would probably say it sounds like death-doom so I just labeled it as so. Though some people have mentioned that there is a certain amount to post-black metal to it. It’s kind of hard to pinpoint it.” Indeed, Tideless hearken back to a time when subgenres were but different hues of paint with which the artists used to express themselves.
Having just returned home from a tour with Xantam–which is the other band of Tideless’ bassist/vocalist, Kyle Armendariz; whose demo you’ve got to check out even if far-out atmospheric death metal isn’t exactly your thing, and for whom Gaitan provides live drums–Tideless are officially a trio, but play as a quartet. Lisa Lee (also of Ruminations) plays lead guitar for all Tideless shows. Says Gaitan: “Lisa and I have been playing for many years together, from Morbid Gods (Lisa’s own band) to later on with Ruminations, which I would say is pre-Tideless.”
Fortunately for you slavering hoarders of corporeality, Tideless returned from said tour with a few remaining copies of their three song demo Sea of Tears. A wonderfully out-of-place and -time demo in the year 2016. Besides the weird Flanger-like effect on the guitars that make the distorted riffs sound like the subtly excoriating winds of Kadath, there’s something else to Sea of Tears that renders it seemingly anachronistic. It’s hard to put one’s finger on what it is. Until a solo rises up, beating its majestic wings, and soars overhead. Then you know exactly what it is that separates Tideless from their peers. It’s that emotion.
Tideless are currently working toward recording an EP comprised of the three songs from Sea of Tears plus two new songs that they’d honed on their recent tour. They hope the EP will be available by wintertime. We hope so, too.
You heard it here first on Demo:listen. Check this space next and every Friday for promising new metal.
