Bong - Self Titled

Mike Smith - Drums
Dave Terry - Bass/Vocals
Mike Vest - Guitars/Effects
Ben Freeth - Sitar

Heavy doesn't mean much in metal anymore, at least as a descriptor; the term has long been diminished by its overuse and misuse. It's gotten to the point where everything is “heavy,” which by logical extension really means that nothing is “heavy.” Except… every once in a great while a band comes along and reconstructs the crumbled edifice of Black Sabbath in such a way that the only word that can possibly apply is “heavy”: UK's doom newcomers Bong are that once in a great while. Their self-titled debut, a two song vinyl only release, is some of the most singularly heavy music I've heard in a long, long time.

Ostensibly this is some sort of sludge/stoner/doom/drone metal and superficially it bears a passing resemblance to many of the great sludge/stoner doom albums, but there are subtle differences. Dopesmoker (or for some of you, Jerusalem)? This is far heavier, both in sound and atmosphere; sure Sleep is shrouded in a dense haze of pot smoke and distortion, but this LP takes that pot smoke and distortion, washes it in liquid LSD and coats the entire thing with mushroom spores. Snailking? Airy spaceship drones these are not; Bong's droning riffs are meteorites burrowing their way into the deepest earth. Come My Fanatics? If you like your thrills easy and cheap, sure it's similar; but the tensions these songs create and sustain are more anxiety and psychological horror than throwback Satanism and slasher flicks. Templeball? That's the occasional acid flashback and this is eating an entire sheet of blotter daily for months. Conference of the Birds? Closer, but any mysticism here is in the service of a heavier, angrier god than Om has ever imagined; Dave Terry's chanting vocals are not for release or religious awakening-No!-they are for summoning old and ancient powers that have been too long forgotten. Amplifier Worship? Closer yet, in sound at least, but Bong is marching uncountable and invisible armies to war, playing battle hymns for warriors, not making slowed-down rock music for innerspace travelers. The Unreal Never Lived? Closest of them all, except YOB has never been as focused and rarely been as propulsive as both of the songs on this album.

The individual instruments congeal into a lumbering, lurching monster, monolithic in both heaviness and intensity. The drums pound; the bass drum is full, low and thick, while the crash and ride are near constantly a-ring-war drums for stoned Northmen pillaging the world in slow motion. Guitars with perfect tone-deep, dense, warm and rich-that crush in their catatonic heaving heaviness; pure doomic tone that outshines any and all Sunns; ethereally fluid and organically earthy, the pulsing breaths of mountains moving and tectonic plates shifting. Plus, there's enough acid rock soloing at the end of “Wizards of Krull” to raise Hendrix from the dead and turn him into a doom metal fan. And a sitar!?! How did no one think of this before (unless there are lost tapes of Shankar jamming free-form with Sabbath from the early 70s and they remain hidden only because their very heaviness would rend a hole in the universe…)? It's well suited to this style, and if strange at first, after repeated listens it's impossible to imagine these songs without the sitar slithering and snaking across, over and through these songs; it functions as the perfect counterpoint to the constant rhythmic thrust that might otherwise overwhelm these songs. A new genre label almost has to be created just to describe Bong's self-titled LP: psychedelic stoner trance doom; but even that only hints at what's contained in these two songs. This is the sound of worlds being birthed from the great vastness of undetectable dark matter and the sound of prayers to gods older than Time itself; this is the essence of doom metal as a spectral conjuring calling forth into our world things too heavy to exist otherwise.

I've had this record for less than two weeks and it's been spinning on my turntable whenever I'm home; I have listened to it at least twenty-five times in the last ten days, it's that good. Seldom have I heard a band so monumentally heavy in mood, atmosphere and musical execution. Hyperbole is lost on, and words fail to properly capture the spirit of, a release like this. After more than twenty years of listening to every kind of metal under the sun, bands like Bong make that twenty odd years of searching for the next heaviest band worthwhile and make me glad to still be a metal fan. If you've ever wondered what “heavy” sounds like in its purest, most distilled form, take a Bong hit and find out.

March 30th, 2009