Black Axis
I was never a fan of slow music. I have tried to get a kick out of Sunn O))), and my enthusiasm lasts for a while, but then I get bored. Same again if they have some interesting guests, but usually it never helps. But then I heard Kollwitz and their debut Like Iron I Rust. They really made me open my ears to doomlike music the way they managed to slow down, but not entirely, black metal, and also still keeping it deep down, dirty and rock hard. With Iconoclast Dream Pombagira manages this to an even wider extent. They create something even more dirty, with deep dark sludging guitars, and outstanding hard, and not slow (!) work on drums.
Pombagira started in 2006 originally as a three-piece band. This fourth album is done by the two remaining members,
Pete (guitar, vocals) and
Carolyn Hamilton-Giles (drums), inspired by having visited Haitian cemeteries, witnessing and participating in Voodoo ceremonies. Thus the album also makes
an even sturdier relationship the band has had with Baron Samedi, the Loa and master of the dead in Haitian Voodoo, and gatekeeper to the graveyard dirt track. As the band’s backline consists of no less than six vintage amps to create the dirty loud sound they crave, and for making
Iconoclast Dream the band needed almost 20 vintage amps, they also certainly signal how important the dirty sound texture is to the band.
Iconoclast Dream has only one song lasting 42 minutes. But it moves in various directions, and even sometimes jumps into a happy mood that makes you wonder if it is actually another song altogether, but then it comes slowly back to the same dark dirty theme that makes you creep closely together in your chair. The hypnotizing chanting loop of the song, and the signing or spitting out the title, is sort of mesmerizing and catching, and makes me also, strangely enough, sing in my head the same word over and over again. Voodoo, anyone? Concluded with samplings from the underworld of the 60s, the album moves its way slowly into my shelf of classical albums that stands out, ready for my own after life party of dark music.
This is no record to play alone in the darkness of a barren landscape of countryside far, far away from civilized people. The overall impression is no less, as it moves in dark territories of my head, and creates such dark soundscapes, the devil himself would suffer from fear of the dark.
-Ronny Wærnes-
