Gavran – Indistinct Beacon
Release Date: 2nd December 2022
Label: Dunk! Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Sludge, Doom.
FFO: DVNE, Nothing, Baroness.
Review By: Andy Spoon
Heavy and hairy, Gavran’s Indistinct Beacon is a dynamically-powerful sludge/doom offering that crams a huge amount of music into just 5 tracks, allowing listeners to sit back and be overwhelmed by the intense mountain of sound that will be one of the better sludge offerings of 2022.
With no single track shorter than 09:18, Gavran’s 2022 release, Indistinct Beacon, is set to be released on December 2nd. Sludge metal is one of the genres that I enjoy because of its roots to the origins of metal. It’s not polished. It’s not pretty. It’s ugly and noisy, meant to piss your Dad off, meant to pull on your internal feelings of chaos or rebellion. I think that the genre hasn’t really needed to evolve much in recent decades, something that makes exploring bands from those eras worthwhile. Gavran is no exception, as their most recent offering, Indistinct Beacon, is not anything necessarily “new” in the sludge/doom genre, but is still absolutely nailing the entire meaning of the subgenre, at least in my view.
Dynamically-diverse, melodically-consistent, and beautifully-orchestrated, Indistinct Beacon is as entertaining as it is brutal on the senses. While each track really feels like two or three tracks in one, there is remarkable consistency across each of the 5 tracks. Unlike some “proggy” tracks that have plots and sub-plots, musically, the atmosphere of the album is about harsh repetition of heavy elements and dramatic volume changes. At any point, a song might take a 3-minute dive into clean guitars, vocals, and almost no drums, only to explode into a mountainous pile of noise and extremity, screaming vocals and fuzzed guitar and bass, crash-riding cymbals clanging harder and harder repeatedly before subsiding into calmness again.
This is the entire reason that we love this genre. Give me some quiet moments followed by wild and crazy loudness. Give me some violent changes that keep me waiting and guessing when they’re going to hit. I enjoy the anticipation of the big breakdowns or the giant refrains. As the flow goes on through each track, you can absolutely see why Gavran needed 9+ minutes to express the language of each track. “Slow and heavy” has the effect of just grinding the themes into the listeners’ ears as the song progresses.
Most tracks follow one or two common themes, generally having a super slow and calm interlude, followed by a big chorus, then going back and forth between either, only to have a huge crescendo at the end, or a quiet refrain which fades out. The other might be a track that starts huge, and then hits a few choice interlude moments in the middle bars. Neither is better than the other, as it seems to be stylistic. It’s merely an observation, as it doesn’t seem to resonate with anything other than dynamic diversity as a central theme (just as in all sludge music). Going from quiet to loud is kind of the “fun” of this entire genre. If it didn’t change much, it’d just be another heavy shoegaze album.
While I’m not necessarily a fanboy of the genre, I like to compare this album to DVNE’s Etemen Ænka, a blissfully-perfect post-metal/doom/sludge album that has much of the same spirit as Indistinct Beacon. I know I could be pissing-off fans of either band by comparing them directly, but I think it’s appropriate to appreciate both albums for what they achieve, which is to keep listeners engaged and emotionally-invested in these tracks. There’s a difference between making art and playing music. I think that Gavran is achieving the former, especially in a genre that tends to lean on repetition as a main part of its appeal.
(4 / 5)
