Bongripper - Empty (2024) Review

Doom-sludge titans Bongripper from Chicago have always dwelt in the low end. With their eighth full length album Empty, the band keeps ripping boundaries of repetition to shreds, expressing themselves through immense instrumental doom metal weight at levels of meditative heaviness that almost no one can replicate. Four tracks (two of them above 20 minutes in duration) and a total of more than an hour of crushing doom in the purest form, at which you'll either surrender to or wholly pass by. 

From the outset, Empty reeks of riff-devotion: detuned guitars, distortion thick as molasses and drums slow-rolling like glaciers in motion. The album has a constant, overwhelmingly dominating hypnotic nature, standing out due to the band's everlasting patience for the long haul. Melodies ruminated upon and stretched to uneasy forms, twisted into murky drone / sludge before returning to clearer doom metal stomps, all delivered with lumbering brute force. 

Opener piece "Nothing" features the slowest build-up and features some interested, distorted Sleep worship towards its last five minutes. Mid-tempo dirges that flirt with crunchy tremolos and ghostly leads appear both at the very end of that track and in the one that follows, "Remains". On "Forever", the band takes a more atmospheric approach that hints at post-doom grandeur rather than blacksmith hammering, reminding of YOB but still quite distinctly played as a Bongripper jam.

The final, self-titled track consolidates Empty's themes of doomy repetition with subtle yet substantial variations, but includes a cathartic release of a blast-beat induced black metal section, that breaks free from the drag of the rest of the rest of the record. At that moment, it brought 2010's Satan Worshipping Doom to mind, as they did something similar on a track on that album, yet I have to admit that I am not sure if it's a more frequent stratagem by the band or if it just appears these two times.

No sound is reinvented on Empty, but that's not what Bongripper are about. The band takes its time on how long to hold notes, when to pull the rug out, and how to compose the most direct, low-tuned and heavy doom metal possible, with neat influences from sludge, drone and stoner. It takes time, and it needs time. The formula might be a bit too comfortable by now, the terrain too familiar, but in this genre, this mastering of atmosphere is what counts. If it's your first time, welcome to the underbelly of doom. [4 out of 5]

Nothing remains forever empty 

Lockdown Chronicles II - P. 1

"The exercise of meditation and memorization requires nourishment. This is where the more specifically intellectual exercises, as enumerated by Philo, come in: reading,  listening, research, and investigation.  It is a  relatively simple matter to provide food for meditation: one could read the sayings of the poets and philosophers, for instance, or the apophthegmata. "Reading," however, could also include the explanation of specifically philosophical texts, works written by teachers in philosophical schools. Such texts could be read or heard within the framework of the philosophical instruction given by a  professor.

Fortified by such instruction, the disciple would be able to  study with precision the entire speculative edifice which sustained and justified the fundamental rule, as well as all the physical and logical research of which this rule was the summary. "Research" and "investigation" were the result of putting instruction into practice. For example, we are to get used to defining objects and events from a physical point of view,  that is, we must picture them as they are when situated within the cosmic Whole. Alternatively, we can divide or dissect events in order to  recognize the elements into which they can be reduced."

Track listing:

1. Iskandr - Verban
2. Horseback - Invokation
3. Apognosis - The Failure of Man
4. Harvestman - Oak Drone
5. Bongripper - Hate Ashbury Part II
6. Trap Them - Organic Infernal
7. Indian - Directional
8. Palehorse/Palerider - Sundowning
9. Bruce Lamont - The Crystal Effect
10. Merkabah - Pitchblende
11. Djevel - Naa er hele livet paa ravnens bord
12. Antediluvian - Luminous Harvest
13. Abyssal - A Casual Landscape
14. Cloud Rat - Seven Heads
15. Saligia - Draining the Well