To appropriate a KLF / JAMMs album title, what the fuck is going on? Old Man Gloom have succeeded in creating a veritable smog of confusion and bewilderment in the run-up to their latest release, ‘The Ape Of God’.
Initially leaked as a bogus version with edited versions of tracks that would subsequently spear on the official release, it’s now emerged that the official release is in fact two releases, in the form of two separate albums, both bearing the same title, namely ‘The Ape of God’.
A couple of well-known websites scored album streams – each being given permission to stream different albums – but unfortunately at the tim of writing, neither stream seems to be working, and so I’m obliged to work from an 8-track promo set, which, if I read correctly, contains tracks from each of the two releases but is different from the bogus hybrid version that was leaked before. I don’t know whether to feel honoured or short-changed, not least of all because it’s unclear which tracks belong to which album. Not that it would be easy to differentiate between two albums with the same title.
A lengthy statement from the band includes the following: “Our task is not an enviable one - to bring light to a world so suffocated in darkness - none the less, a two-volume extrapolation of our previous and ongoing teachings is the least action we could undertake in this dire hour of need. So that's why we made two records at once. And we wanted to trick people into thinking it was only one because the interweb has sucked all the fun out of releasing records and we wanted people to be fucking surprised by something again. At least we tried.”
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Of course, what ultimately matters is whether or not the release / releases is / are any good, and the sampler which features four tracks from each of the eight-track albums is blistering. ‘Fist of Fury’ is appropriately titled, a tense mid-level hum running through its duration while frenzied bursts of noise aggression snarl and squall like an aural typhoon carrying razorblades. ‘The Lash’ is similarly brutal and brief.
When they’re not pildedriving in with the short sharp shock treatment, they’re sprawling over monstrous workouts of six (‘Predators’) nine (Shoulder Meat’) and 14 minutes (‘Arrows to Our Hearts’). These longer tracks offer greater scope for sonic exploration, and are more than mere songs but journeys. As fans will already be aware, OMG certainly know how to build atmosphere and tension, surging disquiet emerging from amidst maelstroms of simmering white noise into devastating crescendos that are the sound of everything in the world breaking all at once.
‘Epic’ and ‘immense’ are more than fitting descriptors here, in every sense. ‘The Ape of God’ is astoundingly ambitious, the sound varied, vast, deep and immensely heavy, and the scope of the project in terms of the structures and, at times, the lengthy track times is truly something else.
Old Man Gloom Online
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