Peaceville, having seemingly picked up the mantle of preservers and purveyors of cult nineties metal, have seen fit to release this right miserable little bugger unto the buying public. A cult Finnish band, Thergothon released this one and only album proper back in 1994, from which time it has attracted a reputation as being one of the most influential and important Funeral doom albums. While I would generally punch myself in the testicles for an hour rather than listen to Funeral doom, the cult like devotion that this album attracts led me to volunteer to review it.
Well, as you would expect, this is SLOW. It isn't, however, as impenetrable and utterly tedious as many of the releases of their eventual Funereal offspring. A remarkably atmospheric platter, this is the aural sound of someone giving up on life. Seriously. Have you ever had one of those days when everything went wrong, then you holed yourself up in your stinking bedroom, drunk and morose, pondering the right way to do yourself in with maximum self pity? Well, that's approximately twice as happy as the music on this shiny disc. Other than the leaden riffing, the beat-a-minute drumming and the growled, pissed-off vocals, there are some other aspects here that mark them out from an increasingly pretentious crowd. Firstly, Thergothon sound like they actually are depressed, rather than wearing their unhappiness as some kind of fashionable accessory, (and yeah, if your shit band has ever been featured in The Guardian Media section, I mean you). Secondly, they break the mould from time to time. There are some sparse cleanly sung sections, a sense of dynamics with the music, with the tempo sometimes changing from death-knell riffing to an almost-tolerably-semi-gallop, as on the immense “Let The Watchers Guard”. The infrequent but tastefully done keyboards are also a pleasant added bonus. There is a line, I think, of how slow a band can be before music turns to tedium, and Thergothon got the balance about perfectly right here.
It isn't a perfect album though. The production is appalling, even by the standards of the day. The guitars sound like they were made out of tissue paper, with a consequent sound so weak that if it were translated into human muscle power, would struggle to blow the skin off a rice pudding. Elsewhere, the keyboards, while nicely composed and played, sound like they were sampled from a hitherto unseen episode of Doctor Who back in the Tom Baker era. I could also be churlish and mention that some of the clean guitar sections on the beginning of “The Unknown Kadath In the Cold Waste” sounds rather less Lovecraftian and rather more like the music box from Bagpuss. That may, of course, have been the intention of the gloomy Finns, though I doubt it.
All in all though, this is a quality release, and I am genuinely grateful to Peaceville for releasing it to us again, as I didn't have this first time round. It requires the listener to immerse themselves in misery, to adopt the cloak of unhappiness and sit on the be-studded stool of boo-hoo-hoo, and that may not be easy for every metal fan to do – but then this was never intended for mass consumption. The vast majority of you can carry on “rocking out” to Machine Head and their clueless brethren; in the meantime, you'll find me sitting like a right miserable sod under a tree somewhere listening to this.
Co-incidentally, readers, what exactly is a “Therg” ? We've had Tellythons, Marathons and the like, so I'd be amused to see what you think a “Thergothon” might actually entail. Answers on a postcard to....
http://www.myspace.com/thergothon
