Rating: 7.9

Country: Finland

Release Date: 2008

Record Label: Totalrust Music

Track list:
1.   Paganus   11:56   
2.   Blood Soaked Boots   08:44   
3.   Skullsplitter   11:08   
4.   Stab   16:33   

Total playing time   48:21

Band Website: Paganus

Paganus - Paganus

Manu Liira - Guitars
Teemu Muhli - Bass
Tomi Pekkola - Drums
Mikko Nenonen - Programming, Effects
Markus Lanki - Vocals

Meet Paganus. They write songs about stabbing. Or maybe they write about getting stabbed -- the best art is widely interpretable anyway. Perhaps misleadingly, the back of my promo case recommends this to fans of Neurosis and High On Fire. Well, maybe; Paganus have their share of crusty Neurosis dynamics. But High On Fire? That's kind of like saying "fans of Mastodon may also enjoy the musical stylings of Japanese doomsday cults." I mean sure, I won't rule it out, but the noise these miserablist doom barons from Finland conjure is a more dire and acidic affair than the consumers of commercial pseudo-doom to whom this is marketed may be able to stomach.

A superior comparison to that of High On Fire would be Sleep at their most pensive and endurance-testing, but with critical levels of Burning Witch scariness and dun-dun-dun-bloaawrgh vintage Cathedral ponderousness & caveman drums; pretty much what you'd expect from a band with song titles like "Skullsplitter." In other words, awesome. More arduous to pigeonhole are the vocals, which range from creepy arthropodal rasping to salty, hoarse bellowing with a goofy faux-Southern accent, but always appropriately fey and hostile. He sounds, in a word, constipated. I know calling a singer constipated is the dullest cliche in music next to the pithy mantra of concentrated non-insight that is "technicality does not equal good music," but it's an understatement in this case; it sounds like the vocalist is passing fish hooks and salt.

While Paganus is about as low and slow as doom can get without transcending into drone or funeral doom, much of the album's inaccessibility is drawn from a rather nauseous contrast of elements. For example, the Triassic "Stab" begins with a layer of harsh, swelling noise that sounds as if derived from Japan, but Paganus cut that shit out in matter of seconds before fifteen minutes of barely mobile ooga booga stegosaurus doom. On the other hand, the initially asphyxiating "Skullsplitter" climaxes on the note of the singer rapturously babbling about his "inner sailor" accompanied by some post-rock jangliness and scratchy electronic textures. Huh. So the balance of this album is occasionally questionable, but when you hear the vocalist howling "my boots are soaked with bloooaawwrrd! My boooots...!" over a lumbering narrative of downtuned doom riffage, it's difficult not to be taken regardless of the band's various wobbly atmospheric discourses.

At times it seems like these guys don't know where they're going, but fuck it, that's almost always more fun than having a destination. Although Paganus may not be self-consciously weird or pretty enough to attract the art-rock crowd to whom they occasionally pander, if you like the sound of tarblack sludge with a strikingly cerebral bent, you'd do well to hear this. 

March 28th, 2008