NIGHT GAUNT - The Room Digi-CD
After an impressive but quite one-dimensional debut album, Night Gaunt needed to pull off something different to find their place in the doom metal world.
The distant vocals of the debut are forgotten even before the end of the brief title track. Now featuring a more epic delivery similar to Rob Lowe’s, the guitars have been controlled to a more moderate boom, clearing up a lot of the fuzz that made songs like ‘Breathless’ stonerish and indeed extremely claustrophobic. Looking at the construction of ‘The Oval Portrait’ (a direct reference that confirms Night Gaunt’s interest in Edgar Allen Poe tales of horror), the slower riffs feature ringing clean arpeggios that drain the energy from the experience like blood from a nocturnal bite, while the band seem much happier to move into mid-pace, allowing drums to kick heartily while a guitar lead toys with the atmosphere indecisively. Other songs too feature a little more variety of pace and texture, ‘Veil’ opening up with a death grunt and bludgeoning sludgy riffing that rips at the limits of the audio range, not to mention a flurry of death metal riffing that sees ‘Penance’ almost incited to blastbeats.
Not only because of the spacious production and more varied instrumental tones of The Room but also due to the actual composition of its 6 songs, it feels that a great deal more happens here than on Night Gaunt’s debut. The running time is a really quite brief 37 minutes, though the increasing knottiness of the two 9 minute closers ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘The Owl’, in addition to the more frequent use of death metal palm-muting, expands the experience to one that will take several attempts to unwind and make sense of. As a result, I would probably recommend The Room to a different kind of doom fan, since I can’t just sit here and listen to the riffs as I could on the debut: this has a special darkness and threat too that makes comparisons to Candlemass and epic doomsters like Altar of Oblivion a surface level analysis of the vocal timbre, not the emotion and songwriting of the record. Indeed, specific comparisons are difficult for me to reach, and that’s not for a lack of doom listening, more for the fact that Night Gaunt have done something that combines several intriguing features into a largely novel whole.