Slumber - Fallout

Genre: Doom Metal -

SomeOne gave me a tip about this album not long ago. Or rather, the opening masterpiece Rapture, which was enough to hook me in and look up the entire thing. These Swedish guys recorded a few demos, leading up to one full length effort, before subtly transforming into the less metallic Atoma, a likewise capable band but with slightly less captivating outputs. Slumber’s Fallout being graced with a 95% average on the Metal Archives might seem an exaggeration, but it really is not. It’s one of those albums which basically are simply perfect, or with flaws so small they seem non-existent. Really, the biggest flaw I can find is its relatively short runtime, as the entire thing clocks in at 37 minutes and at only seven tracks. And not even that is even bad, as it leaves no time for bullshit or for a single minute of filler. Every minute is justified.

Slumber - Fallout

Captivating from moment one with the mind blowing Rapture, this album quickly delves into deeper territories of your brain as it mashes out some of the best melodic doom entranced with heavy death metal elements that this world has ever seen. The haunting atmosphere set by Ehsan Kalantarpour’s keyboards, coupled with the lead guitar work of Markus Hill and Jari Lindholm (by the way, if you like this - and you will - I strongly recommend checking out Lindholm’s ongoing project, Enshine), as well as the riffs that encompass most every song - perhaps mostly on opener Rapture or the brooding When Nothing Was Left - make for some truly entrancing moments in the cosmic darkness that envelops this album. In keeping with the doom-y atmosphere, the music on here is slow and heavy with no real moments for speed or showing off. Instead, the atmosphere is in highest priority.

Chills run up my spine during the slow interlude in title track Fallout, where a guitar plays alongside a solemn wind chime, then slowly leads into an epic sounding guitar solo. Enter the magnificent vocals of Siavosh Bigonah, and the hair stands all over my body as he fills the darkness with growls so potent in delivery, and so emotive in intonation, that his every word must surely be brought from the depths of the human subconscious, darkly poetic and invoking a sense that your own innermost thoughts have been read and put to words. There is literally no aspect of this album which is not good, and it does no good for me to pick out everything about it that I love, because this review would be very long. In short, this is the perfect doom and death metal hybrid, and it’s a damn shame that the world won’t see a follow up to this album. When closing track A Wanderer’s Star, with its exceptional twin guitar work and epicly monstrous feel, fades you’re left there overcome by the sensations left by this album; hauntingly artistic and entrancingly arcane.

 

Standout tracks: Rapture, A Wanderer’s Star, or, well... all of them.

 

    

Read the review on the Metal Archives

 

Slumber - Fallout