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Warhorse > As Heaven Turns to Ash.... > 2001, 2 12" vinyls, Southern Lord Recordings (Limited edition) > Reviews
Warhorse - As Heaven Turns to Ash....

It’s better to burn out than to fade away. - 95%

Witchfvcker, March 30th, 2015
Written based on this version: 2015, 2 12" vinyls, Southern Lord Recordings (Limited edition, Reissue)

Formed in 1996 and disbanding sometime after 2002, the Massachusetts-based trio Warhorse released only one album before dissolving. It’s telling, then, that As Heavens Turns To Ash belongs up there with the likes of Sleep’s Holy Mountain, tapping into the blackest fuzz-hungry parts of the human consciousness and inducing vividly apocalyptic hallucinations. A long overdue re-acquaintance, their sole full-length comes reissued through Southern Lord, packaged with the band’s final EP I Am Dying.

With bottom-heavy impulses taken from the likes of Sleep and Acid King, Warhorse built their church on mammoth riffs and devastating heaviness. Recorded by Jerry Orne, Mike Hubbard, and Todd Laskowski, As Heavens Turns To Ash is a dynamic trip through scorched post-apocalyptic wastelands and bottomless psychotropic oceans. Orne’s rumbling basslines rival Al Cisneros on a good day, with a filthy sludge edge that is practically drenched in fuzz. Planets burst and mountains collapse under the massive bulk of “Black Acid Prophecy”, a deafening masterpiece of corrosive doom. The parched journey is divided by the intoxicating acoustic numbers “Amber Vial” and “Dawn”, before the ecliptic planet caravan sets course back towards the center of the universe.

With a low-end spectrum out of this world, “Every Flower Dies…” is another mournful monument. A slower number, the band veers into space rock territory, supported by a metric fuckton of bass. War, disease, pestilence, famine, and riffs. One seldom hears doom at this magnitude, and before departing this mortal coil, Warhorse made sure to leave one hell of a legacy. The somewhat crude shine of the 2001 recordings has been left intact, a wise move by Southern Lord. Take away the raw production, and the unrelenting heaviness might have suffered. A slow grinding experience, As Heavens Turn To Ash combines the best of early Electric Wizard with psych rock solos and Goatsnake grooves. Thunder on the tundra and wailing guitars. It all comes together and crawls across your face and neck, boring into every cavity and massacring speakers.

The accompanying EP takes a more meandering approach, opening with lethargic bongos and a very Sabbathian sound. Leaning towards a more guitar-driven sound, the colossal sound of the preceding album unfortunately feels a little washed out on the EP. Nevertheless, the last two tracks on this reissue are still solid material, simply falling short of the monumental trip that came before. It’s a fine addition to a release that was already damn near perfect.

With this album, Warhorse unleashed a fuzzed out, groovy Armageddon spectacle. A testament to the massive potential of three guys with a bunch of amps, As Heaven Turns To Ash is a modern classic. Considering the added bonus of the I Am Dying EP, there is no time like the present. You need this album in your life.


Written for The Metal Observer

Essential stoner metal - 97%

iamntbatman, May 20th, 2010

Warhorse are really something of an enigma. The band had released two demos and an EP previous to the release of this, their only full-length, and went on to release a final 7" before calling it quits. Oddly, the quality of those other releases varies from quasi-listenable to "meh." The strange decline on that final single aside, what's really astonishing is the band's transformation from horribly produced, meandering near-nonsense on their previous two EP's to near-perfection on this album within the space of a single year. Given the band's apparent taste for psychedelics, one can only assume that their drug intake and tolerance finally hit some sort of beautiful equilibrium that found them uncharacteristically able to communicate their drug-fueled sonic adventures into actual, listenable recorded music. Perhaps their inability to recreate that equilibrium is what led to their demise but in any case what resulted is some of the finest stoner metal I've ever had the pleasure of hearing.

On As Heaven Turns to Ash, Warhorse lay into some of the thickest, grooviest, most memorable stoner riffs ever to crawl forth from the psychedelic void. The guitar tone on this album is absolutely immense. The line between guitar and bass is tenuous at best and the whole thing is fuzzier than a furby with a finger in a wall socket but the clarity in production is astounding. The gigantic, grinding riffs manage to trample on while never stepping a toe on the bass drums; needless to say the effects-laden lead guitar isn't hindered in the slightest. But holy hell, those riffs! When the distortion kicks on after the brief intro to "Black Acid Prophecy" I could swear my body hair count at least doubled. I'm all too familiar with hyperbolic statements about giants stomping on buildings and rhinos with jackhammers for horns stampeding through concrete bunkers and that sort of thing that you usually find in stoner metal reviews (and Bolt Thrower reviews, naturally) but all of that hyperbole really does apply in this case. The band never once descends into the aimless noodling that plagued their EP's. These are slow (but nowhere near drone) to mid-paced monsters that are pure bluesy Sabbath worship. Check the riff that comes in at around 5:10 on the aforementioned "Black Acid Prophecy" (incidentally one of the few riffs where the guitars and bass are really distinct) for evidence of just how damn good these guys are at writing absolutely perfect stoner riffs. The really amazing thing about the whole affair is that apparently that titanic guitar tone was produced on a crappy solid state Crate amp along with the same Boss FZ-2 pedal that Electric Wizard abused so brilliantly on Dopethrone. No expensive Orange Amp stacks for these lads. There's some really excellent use of lead guitar on this album, too. The leads are usually a fuzzy, noodly, wah-heavy psychedelic lines recall Hendrix just as much as they do Iommi and there are often two lead lines at once while never letting up the tonnage on the rhythm lines.

The vocal performance is really the only thing holding this back from absolute perfection. Orne uses a sort of gruff, rough edged sort of shout. I suppose they're harsh enough to count as "harsh vocals" but they're nowhere near the kind of delivery you'd hear in black or death metal. Maybe imagine Animal from The Muppets minus the caveman speak and awkward heavy breathing. On "Every Flower Dies..." the sparse vocals are drenched in a lot of effects, which wouldn't suit them on the other songs here but given the sort of trippy, repetitive nature of this particular track the effect is quite welcome. The vocals are mixed fairly low so don't really stand out much, which is something of a blessing given their fairly pedestrian delivery. This also isn't really a vocal-heavy album; there are lots of extended instrumental segments so the vocals aren't really a central component to the music. I don't dislike the vocals at all and they don't detract from the experience in the slightest, but had a more powerful, emotive style been used I feel like it would have taken this album to the next level. A missed opportunity, at worst.

The drumming is fairly subdued but fits the style well and is more varied than, for a point of close comparison, Mark Greening from Electric Wizard. There are more than a few really interesting patterns (the intro to "Every Flower..." comes immediately to mind, along with the drum solo in the middle of the song) but the performance is never really flashy and you won't hear any double bass on this one. As far as stoner metal drumming goes, though, this is definitely far above average and should be exciting enough to hold the interest of nearly any drum aficionado.

What really sets this album apart, aside from the sheer brilliance of its riffs, is the sequence of songs and the songwriting itself. Of the nine songs on the album, four are shorter instrumental interlude pieces but bring a lot of much-needed variety to this often boring and samey type of track. Opener "Dusk" is a gentle acoustic guitar piece that does an amazing job of lulling the listener into a false sense of security before the opening of "Doom's Bride" hits you in the gut like a metric ton of filth. "Amber Vial" is an Eastern-sounding piece with some tribal-sounding drumming and a droning guitar line that sort of reminds me of a sitar (though not as jangly) and bridges the gap between the doomy behemoth "Black Acid Prophecy" and the hypnotic "Every Flower Dies..." excellently. "Dawn" has some really pretty, almost pastoral acoustic guitar work and some minimal drumming and album closer "And the Angels Begin to Weep" is a brooding piano piece caught somewhere between horror and despair. While these interlude pieces are all excellent, it's the longer, ten-minute doom suites that really serve as the backbone of the album and steal the show. Despite their long running times, the songs almost never beg to be edited to a more reasonable length or to have riff changes happen more often. That's not to say you'll find a new riff every few seconds on this album, but the riffs themselves are so damn catchy and flow together so flawlessly that the record will have your utmost attention throughout its running time. The band also does an excellent job of sewing together the really subdued segments and the heaps of absolute sonic destruction, with the intro to "Scrape" being a dramatic example of this technique. It really lends a hell of a lot of weight to those doom riffs once they come crashing in and serves to show just exactly how much these guys know precisely what they're doing. This really is the type of record where, after a few listens, every single riff will elicit shouts of "oh hell yeah, I love this part right here!"

While the atmosphere is certainly drug-fueled, it also has a decidedly evil bent to it. Again, I draw comparison to nearest sonic milepost Electric Wizard: while the Wizard are all old horror movies, weed, Lovecraft and Satan, Warhorse play the soundtrack to a really intense hallucinatory journey that mostly maintains a positive atmosphere yet which has the threat of the "bad trip" looming in the background the entire time. If you've heard other material by the band, I really encourage you to give this album a shot as it's a completely different beast from the disappointing remainder of their discography. I would even go so far as to say that it sits on top of the stoner metal heap along with legendary records like Sleep's Holy Mountain, Electric Wizard's Dopethrone and Kyuss' Blues for the Red Sun. This is absolutely recommended to even the most casual fans of doom/stoner metal and would make a good starting point for both extreme metal fans trying to get into the genre (due to the generally dark atmosphere and harsh vocals) and traditional/doom metal fans looking for something a little harsher than what they're used to (due to the unabashed Sabbath worshipping riffery). Tune in, drop out and turn this one way up.

This album is played... As heaven turns to ash - 89%

chainsawexecution, February 9th, 2005

First off, I must say that I really don't understand why this album is rated so low. Although it's contents may not be the most original ever done, It is certainly not bad. Rather the opposite in my opinion; It is damn good.

It's starts of with a quite minimalistic intro played with a pair of acoustic guitars. This is certainly nothing interesting nor great, but it works fine. There are four of these instrumental bits on the album, my favorites being the oriental-sounding Amber Vial and the calm acoustic bit Dawn. So I guess that leaves the intro and the outro as the most uninteresting songs on this album.

Warhorse play heavy-as-hell doom with nice Black Sabbath type riffs and groovy solos. The production is quite raw with lots of distortion and bass, and as the vocals are raw as well, it all fits together nicely. It would be even nicer if the vocals were a little more varied, but that's no big problem.

All songs except the instrumental pieces clock around ten minutes, it can appear boring hard to listen to at first, but don't let that scare you away... Give it a few spins and then you probably know if you like it or not :)

My favorite tunes: Doom's Bride & Black Acid Prophecy.