Self-described as "challenging", Orme's 2024 offering "No Serpents, No Saviours" is indeed tough but worth every crushing minute.
Press play on Orme’s newest EP No Serpents, No Saviours, and out blasts crematorium-temperature heat. The self-professed “world’s slowest band” pulverize, scorch, and grind the world and listener’s ears on this the single-track, multi-movement release that clocks in at just over twenty-four minutes. Orme call their album “challenging”, but it is worth every crushing minute. No Serpents, No Saviours can be divided into three sections: the first six minutes, then minute six to sixteen, and sixteen to close. Section one begins with the end as it finds humankind in agony, disowned by God as a result of their total ignorance and inhumanity. It is slow, ferocious, and unyielding as a steamroller. The incinerator has begun turning its fodder to ash, but this cremator has not even fully preheated.
Sibilant whispers bring a new depth of sound in the second section. Chaotic, desperate noise scratches the eardrums as the pressure grows. Blackened landscape settles into its new reality. Walls of noise perish and give way to a single plodding drumbeat as section two draws to a close. As if a great apocalyptic beast treads the land, the thumping drumbeat tramples and grinds before it everything that remains. The voice of Prospero from The Masque of the Red Death intones the present scene: there is nothing but “famine, war, pestilence, disease and death”. If hell is the absence of God, then Orme provide the soundtrack for damnation. As the final section draws to a close, guitarist Tom Clements solos while Rome burns. The psychedelic wailing rings halfway between a celebration for the death of man and a lament of terrible loss. It is up to the Earth and God whether they will rebuild.
No Serpents, No Saviours is challenging, not because of its length but because it is so desolate. It is not crushing like the beautiful depths of the ocean; it crushes with an atomic blast of heat and destruction. Orme’s 2024 chunk of death-doom is a powerful listen, with just the right mix of Jimmy Long’s droning, twisting bass; Clements’ screeching guitars and tortured vocals; and Luke Thelin’s lumbering, powerful drums. They’ve cranked the heat to annihilating, and fans of death-doom would be remiss to miss searing their faces staring into Orme’s vision of cataclysm.
Photo Credit: Orme