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Heavy Lord > Chained to the World > Reviews
Heavy Lord - Chained to the World

It's the epic tracks that draw you in - 70%

Jayaprakash, December 13th, 2007

It isn’t often that I find myself looking forward to a band’s longer songs even more than the shorter ones. However, it’s on the epic tracks that Netherlands’ Heavy Lord really drew me in. There’s a tectonic immensity to their riffs and structures on ‘Chained To The World’, their second album, that is best experienced in a more extended context – a sense of vastness that brings their doomy sludge music a step closer to the post-metal realms of Neurosis.


Still, they’re equally good on the shorter songs. ‘Chained To The World’ purveys groovy, chugging and ominous riffs that wouldn’t be out of place in a New Orleans stoner context. On ‘Serpento’, the band takes us deeper into that swamp with dragged-out riffs and tortured vocals, as well as jams (and a B-movie horror aura) that recall Electric Wizard in their single-minded intensity – another recurring reference point on this album. There are also traces of NWOBHM energy and melody mixed in with the more traditional Black Sabbath worship.


But those lugubrious, mesmerizing dirge-jams really get underway with ‘Maelstrom’, a mammoth 10-minute plus track. With a slow, gradually building set-up in which the band intelligently employs simple but effective layering, the song takes its own time to develop, stripping down to a lone bass intoning the main motif before moving into the first verse. There are more than a few shades of Electric Wizard here, but deployed in a manner that is inspired rather than derivative. When the song finally takes off into a speedier passage, it’s the oldest trick in the book (also known as Black Sabbath maneuver A3), but it ends the song on a totally effective note of resolution. ‘Darius II’ carries on in this speedy vein, reminding me a bit of the more manic moments on an Acid Bath record, although this singer is a throat-ripping bile spewer, miles away from Dax Riggs’ more singerly intonations. The song moves through some effective, efficient tempo shifts and rhythmic interplay, and then its over. It’s a so-so aperitif, but the main course is just ahead.


The next two songs are long, trailing epics that push the sound further towards the post-metal territory I alluded to earlier. ‘Looking Into The Maker’s Eyes’ rises from a meditative, anticipatory introduction built around an undistorted motif into a riff that is colossal and majestic, like continental drift sped up for human perception. Again, there’s a tasteful use of simple but cumulatively brilliant fills and guitar layers. Halfway through, there’s a shift into a more uptempo gear, again wonderfully augmented with just-right layers and fills as the pace gets steadily more frenetic, before reprising the mid-tempo menace of the earlier half of the song, ending with a steady drop in tempo, as if the continents were subsiding back to their usual pace. ‘Eternal Crawl’ is simply immense from the get-go, putting out riffs that wouldn’t be out of place on the more epic sections of a Corrosion Of Conformity album, or Soundgarden circa Badmotorfinger, after a concise, quietly menacing bass intro. The song pits some of the mellowest vocals (relatively) vocals on the album against these awesome grooves before threatening to devolve into nothingness via some very portentous, drawn-out chord sequences. Sustain is an wonderful musical assault tool, and Heavy Lord makes the most of it at this point, as immense chords clash against each other with only a rudimentary drum presence as anchor. Gradually, subtle, interesting variations are introduced and the band does what they seem to be best at – taking a really good riff through its paces, with a new twist at every other turn, eventually restoring the status quo of the first section of the song.


‘Waiting To Die’ recapitulates the scope of Heavy Lord’s style, with an initially fast-paced misanthropic squall segueing into soaring sludge, if such a thing is possible.


Heavy Lord is a band that’s able to add a truly immense aspect to their sound without wandering beyond the tools and techniques of their chosen style, and to bring the noise when it’s required as well. However, I’d definitely say that their longer songs are more interesting, with a sense of development and meaningful iteration that makes them feel huge rather than merely long. The shorter material doesn’t always match up, especially ‘Darius II’ and Waiting To Die’, even if that’s partly because of their juxtaposition with such epic tracks. 2007 has been a great year for fans of sludge, doom and stoner music. Even so, I’d say that Heavy Lord have managed to pull off a worthy addition to the already stellar roundup.

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