By combining lumbering, Black Sabbathian riffage with spacious passages of sadness and introspection and melding gothic and experimental elements, London’s Grave Lines create their own take on the tropes of doom metal, aptly dubbed ‘heavy gloom’. Honing and adding to this formula in the years since their formation in 2015, third album Communion is certainly both heavy and gloomy from the word go.
A blast of feedback ushers opening track ‘Gordian’ into life, before emerging into a chugging stomp with bellowed vocals courtesy of frontman Jake Harding. Before long though the fairly conventional beginnings coagulate oppressive, sludgy mire, as if being pulled apart at the seams, giving way over the concluding minutes into guttural growls and a wall of noise. It’s a bold approach to an opening number, almost inverting the traditional songwriting process by starting with something relatively tight and regimented and purposefully unravelling it, this unorthodox trick is in a sense repeated on the following track ‘Argyraphaga’, which first establishes itself as a pummeling, groove-laden bruiser before falling apart into a gloomy abyss.
In addition to the more traditional doom metal milieu, there is an unmistakably 90s influence running just below the surfaces, with riffs often recalling the flavour of some of the heavier instances of the grunge movements, and Harding’s vocals having shades of the likes of Mark Lanegan and Scott Walker.
This being fundamentally a doom album, albeit one that is unafraid to throw other influences into the mix, it’s unsurprising to note the relatively long average song length, with ‘Lycaenid’ in particular taking up a monolithic 11 minutes. The record comprises only 6 fully fleshed out tracks and one interlude though, meaning that it does not outstay its welcome, and to their credit the individual songs feel as if they have been meticulously constructed, appearing almost as eldritch monuments rising up out of a desolate landscape, requiring careful examination to properly understand. Such music naturally benefits from repeated listens to a greater degree than comparatively more immediate material, it’s clear that the band were not aiming to write bangers here, but instead to create a series of dynamic journeys that contrast between vicious intensity and mournful fragility.
Grave Lines demonstrate a deft grasp of the more crushing and chaotic aspects of doom, but are also able to employ soaring, melodic elements on occasion without losing their sense of sinister gravitas. This fused with their additional influences results in an album that is varied and sonically distinct, with plenty of meat on its bones to satisfy the doom junkies.