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Toil > Obscure Chasms > Reviews
Toil - Obscure Chasms

PBDZ4: A glimmer of hope form the land of despair - 85%

vrag_moj, January 5th, 2010

A nasty guitar-heavy onslaught with sublimely thick keyboards and distant tormented vocals. The production is very much home-made – insanely full guitars + garage drums and great keys and vocals. This project hailing somewhere from the west coast of the US of A delivers 7 tracks of idiosyncratic Black Metal. I have heard the anti-USBM argument many times; the “popular” BM acts from over there (no names named) are all shit and the whole scene is atrocious. But I’ve never believed this to be true. In a way I perceive US to be a big overgrown backyard, like Bathurst NSW stretching onwards and onwards. Once you get out of the trimmed lawns of Hollywood, which is our only portal into how Americans live, you hit the wide expanses of this country with each vaguely large city harbouring its own spiritually dispossessed, making unholy music, which is often their only alternative to despair. Somewhere in that urban desolation there must be glimmers of inspiration. One just has to look beyond the bands you’re “supposed to hear”. Toil, I think is one such band.

For one thing these guys produce some catchy fucking riffs. That, in conjunction with the dynamic almost carelessly off-hand drums is what make this such an enjoyable listen. There is a quite a bit of really downcast-style melody here that’s reminiscent of American depressive bands (that phenomenon having taken a particularly firm root in that country) but the end result is not downturning misery, because of how dynamic this music is, it flows somehow, even reluctantly towards conclusions and climaxes. The howling vocals in combination with the barely audible keys produce an incredible effect of deep, distant sorrow and incomprehensible shadowy activity somewhere just out of reach of full perception.

Great obscure album from some highly decorated musicians. Don't pass this by because of the previous review or because you've heard you're supposed to hate USBM - this is really great.

Originally published in Procession of Black Doom zine #4

Richard Linklater's favourite black metal band? - 68%

BM_DM, July 30th, 2007

Imagine a world where Dinosaur Jr. made black metal albums, and you've made the conceptual leap necessary to be able to understand, or at least tolerate, Toil.

Stand-out track 'Hopelessness' features distorted screamed / yelped vocals, not dissimilar to the train-noises emitted by the Nazgul (Ita) vocalist, overlayed with staccato, rather than languid, slacker guitar lines that would otherwise not sound out of place on a J. Mascis record. The rhythm section features the cheapest bass money can buy flapping its way through a cheerful-sounding complementary riff whilst trying to keep the strings somewhere near the fretboard, supported by a drum kit adorned with paper grocery bags for skins. It all sounds like a recipe for disaster, but is in fact disarmingly pleasing. For all that, it is surprisingly enjoyable.

For me, the rest of the album doesn't match up to this extraordinary excursion from the norm as a consequence of its largely being an exercise in genre-hopping, lo-fi black metal hybridization. In short, this release has been afflicted by The Curse Of USBM in that there is just too much experimentation for its own good. 'Obscure Chasms' is an exhausing listen, and whilst there is much in it to appreciate on a one-track-at-a-time basis, it is far less enjoyable to sit down and listen to the whole release in one go.