With three tracks spanning a full hour, everything about Bong’s eponymous debut from 2009, reissued for the first time on CD (just 500 copies of the original vinyl were pressed) is epic. This is one of those albums that takes doom and drone and slowly grinds them into the ground.
‘Wizards of Krull’ is a musical monolith, the guitars churning like mud while the drums pound at barely a beat per minute, crashing cymbals breaking through the heavy clay sods of bottom end while cavernous vocals drone a mantra from a pit somewhere in purgatory. From amidst the all-encompassing sludge, an eastern guitar motif crawls, while another guitar howls pure bloody murder as the track builds to a frenzy on ketamine.
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The album’s 26-minute centrepiece, ‘The Starlit Grotto’ twists and undulates like a slow-motion serpent and winds its way toward an eternity in the deepest, darkest corner of hell. Finally, ‘Asleep’ crawls toward the exit, taking almost eighteen minutes to do so. It’s an ocean of hypnotic drone from which you may never wake up. It may be the stuff of nightmares, but it’s one hell of an album.
8/10
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