Many folks, even some instrumental bands I've interviewed, have said how do you connect to Steve Vai? The prevailing opinion amongst them is that Vai is simply flexing his muscles for 90 minutes each night. Well this is something that a goodly number of metal bands do each night. There's the constant blast beats that run concurrently with the unchanging demonic vocals. Distort the bass from note one and what we have is a preening tosser on the beach. For the record, anyone who thinks that about Steve Vai simply hasn't heard, they may have listened, but haven't heard.
Anyway, The Cawling hail from one of the four countries in the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland. This part of the UK, along with Wales, is sort of, behind a curtain for me, so it's nice to see behind the veil. Our friends are one of the many metal slashers in the world. They're Doom Slash <insert slashing motion> death metal. We're going to ignore the fact that all metal is really doom slash something.
What The Crawling have done is taken the strongest elements of these two types of metal and welded them into something new. Coincidentally, the strongest parts of Doom Metal cancel out the weakest parts of Death Metal and vice versa.
Death Metal, by and large, is monotonous and Doom Metal, by and large, lacks serious aggression. By taking the aggression of Death Metal and the progressiveness of Doom Metal, The Crawling have birthed a spectacular album.
The doom waves splash over the crunch death metal riffs. As Metallica taught us all, the double bass pedal isn't non de rigueur. Blast beats are like vibrato on the guitar, they're accents, not words.
Anatomy of Loss has already secured its place in my personal Top Ten of 2017 and this is their debut.
Nik Cameron
Glacially Musical
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