In a hole in the ground there lived a perfectly ordinary death metal band, thank you very much. Not a warm, comfortable, well-appointed hole such as a hobbit might live in, but a deep, dark hole in the mire. Full of death and ooze, and the sort of creeping, grasping fog one reads about in gothic novels. Now take that classic death sound and drag its entrails down an octave or two, throw in a healthy slug of raw, sludgy malice, insert a giant spider or two to liven things up, and take a seat.
You’re now in roughly the right place to encounter Fog Wall, their unique brand of Tolkien-flavoured mayhem, and their debut offering, Gloomweaver.
Now, about that perfectly ordinary death metal band. Fog Wall may well have begun as a death metal band, but a funny thing has happened to them in the mire. Tendrils of different flavours have seeped into that death sound until the whole thing is shot through with veins of black sludge, power and whatever else resides in the swamp. All of which results in an album that is ostensibly a death metal one, but that actually has a pretty distinctive style to it, which is no mean feat in the crowded world of metal.
Essentially Fog Wall has produced the aural equivalent of a swamp, with a heavy, dense core to the album that anchors everything, weighing the whole sound down, to the point that the vocals, melodies and other components often sound like they’re trying to escape, not simply be heard. Out of this setup comes an album that is remarkably coherent for all the different faces it shows the listener. There is a Fog Wall take on classic death here, such as on ‘The Accursed’, but there are also places where that combines with black distortion and sludgy filth to create something altogether darker and more menacing. ‘Knife, Sting, Tooth’ is probably the best example of this and one of the high points of Gloomweaver.
“Essentially Fog Wall has produced the aural equivalent of a swamp...”
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Elsewhere there are a couple of tracks that sound like they might be from different albums entirely. ‘Strangling Gloom’ has a significant number of lighter and softer edges, and while it roars into full flow halfway through, the overall effect is closer to something from the world of post or doom. At the very end of the album, ‘Traverse’ provides us with what is probably the closest thing to straight death metal, as Fog Wall briefly step away from some of the other genres they’ve been playing with.
If there’s one thing that’s lacking somewhat, the Tolkien and general dark fantasy theming ends up being a little bit peripheral, and the titles don’t always seem to match up with the content of the tracks. For example, ‘Frantic Orb Weaver’ begins with Denethor’s famous last words about burning like heathen kings of old, which is an interesting take on the old steward – and the spoken word portions add a nice bit of atmosphere and scene-setting, but don’t really do much beyond that. It’s possible that the lyrics tie all of this together, but without a copy of them, it’s difficult to say.
The really important thing here, however, is that however you feel about the inner workings of Gloomweaver in all their peculiarity, it is, on the whole, an enormous amount of fun. It’s filthy, frantic, heavy as all get out, and frankly, a bit of an unexpected journey.