Rating: 8.3

Country: France

Genre: Atmospheric Doom/Sludge

Record Label: Aesthetic Death Records

Release Date: 2008

Track list:
1. Asleep and Threatening 10:44
2. Staring at The Abyss 11:42

Total playing time 22:25

Band Website: Eibon

Eibon - Self Titled

Georges Balafas - Vocals
Max - Guitars
Stéphane Rivière - Bass
Jerome - Drums

Eibon plays atmospheric doom metal mixed with some old fashioned NOLA sludgecore. Now I know what you're thinking: the last few years have seen an explosion in numbers of these “atmospheric doom” bands, the bands that heeded the clarion call of Neurosis and Isis and gave the metal world a relatively new genre for the first time in years. For a while I ate up everything these bands released and consequently my music collection is crammed with LPs and CDs of bands from all over the world plying this style. What I realized more than a thousand dollars too late is that most of those albums were good for a few listens, five or six at the most really, and then that's it-they got put away and now, unless I'm laid up sick for an entire week or driving across the country I never listen to those albums. They became just more background noise in a world of constant background noise; it took me some time to figure out the commonality between almost all of them that led to the same inevitable end: they have no urgency and they have no immediacy (as for the latter, I do not need my music instantly accessible-I do have at least twenty albums that consist of only one or two songs-but there has to be a “catch” in there somewhere). While those albums I'm referring to aren't necessarily boring, for the most part they are just “there”, and most of the songs are cut from one of two maddeningly predictable cloths: a ten minute full song crescendo (haven't needed any more of these since Oceanic) or a ten minute mid paced rumbler (haven't needed any more of these since Cult of Luna's The Beyond). A couple of each of those types, throw in an ambient interlude or two, make the album an hour long and Voila! another atmospheric doom album. Thankfully for us, Eibon avoid that on this two song EP, injecting enough newness into the genre to make me a fan again.

These Frenchmen are not fucking around with artsy, post-rock bullshit here, they aren't trying to sell you on the beauty of brutality or convince you of the aesthetic values of heaviness. While there are nuances galore in the songwriting, those nuances serve the heaviness, not the other way around. This is pure soulcrushing atmospheric doom with (un)healthy dollops of southern Louisiana sludge slopped on the side. The first four minutes of “Asleep and Threatening” sound like a slightly modernized Eyehategod fronted by Dixie Dave, while the last six minutes takes that EHG sound and smashes it into the space vacated when Buried At Sea disbanded. From 9:19 ‘til the song's end is a heaving, churning testament to the unholy power of the riff, a twisted, chugging monster rising up from the murkiest, swampiest depths of sludgecore's glorious past; and it's riffs like that are that raise this EP far above the masses proffering the same saturated style. But not just any riff will do: too intricate and the songs lag and are more meandering stream than onrushing flood waters, too chunky and the band is adrift in an ocean of pissweak metalcore, too slow and the songs turn into funeral doom boredom, but somehow Eibon consistently finds the right riffs. The second song “Staring at the Abyss” has just a hint of southern twang in the guitars, guitars that erupt intermittently into a down-strummed pulsing grind that sounds like Neurosis covering Grief or Rosetta covering Toadliquor. It captures the raw immediacy of classic sludge while mixing in the simmering intensity of the best atmospheric doom bands to create a wall of ominous sound.

Eibon isn't making pretty music and I wouldn't want it any other way. From the opening forty-three seconds of feedback to the closing windswept fade out twenty minutes later, this is absolutely bludgeoning atmospheric doom. They get just about everything right on this short EP; and that is really my only complaint: I wish it was twice as long. 

May 11, 2009