Sub Templum

Kings of drone? Moss are up there definitely. There are many bands that are slow as hell but Moss take the cake especially on this album. This is so slow it makes bands like Grief seem somewhat faster. My goodness when the snare drum gets hit it takes at least 15 seconds in between. That's really nauseatingly slow in musical terms. This is not for you fans of up tempo thrash or speed driven death or black metal you've been warned. It takes a lot of patience to dig this style so just putting it out there.

So let's describe each song since they're are only 4 tracks. The first track is called 'Ritus' and its basically an intro. It's made up of a church organ and weird sounds for 5 minutes and it's a dark and spooky sound. It sets you up for what's coming up. Then the second song starts it's called "Subterraen". Here we go into the 23 minute sludge drone extreme doom that is really slow as shit. I can't emphasize how slow this is...feedback is so loud in between each riff that knocks you over. Production is dirty too which maybe it's done on purpose I'm not sure. But it sounds good anyhow. As much as I dig some extreme doomy stuff..this song is just too long that's my problem with it. I think it would've sat better at 8 to 10 minutes long to be quite honest. But it's too much for 23 minutes.

Next is "Dragged To The Roots" which is a great song that sits well but it doesn't drag so much like "Subterraen". This is the best song on the record in my book. The riff is more structured and it works better that way. It's definitely the bright spot on this album. Then you have the final song called "Gate 7 Devils From The Outer Dark" which is a really weird title to be honest. This is the slowest song on here and the longest as well. 36 minutes on basically two riffs that drone in between beats that are so ridiculously slow. I liked some of this song but at 36 minutes it's way too much out of control with the length. If it was cut down to 10 minutes it would have been alot better. The band should have realized that. It's not good to drag a riff or 2 for 36 minutes...alot of people would never make it through the whole song let's tell the truth. This is for a limited audience my friends and I don't think some doom fans would last for 36 minutes either. I certainly couldn't I just knew it dragged way too long after 10 minutes.

So there you have it some extremely slow drone doom with black metal vocals like I had said before in my review of their EP "Tombs Of The Blind Drugged". But the 2 epics on here are way slower and the drone lasts a long while. This is a good album but the longer songs shouldn't have been that long...unnecessary for them to drag on for 20 to 35 minutes. Like I said earlier this is not for fans of metal who like some up tempo riffs or guitar solos either...you ain't going to find that here. This is bleak sounding mournfully sickening slow doom that knows what they want to do. Pummel you with riffs and feedback and drone. That's the misery they like to deliver.

Far far away from melodies, warmth and emotion, three Englishmen bring you misery, ruins, doom and gloom on their second effort and they even summon the devil with a ritual of bong. They offer us a more misanthropic approach this time around, their sound is depressive and without a doubt, you know that "Sub Templum" will make the earth trembles under your feet with the power of crushing doom. This monster they unleashed is hard to swallow, it is fierce, brutal and nihilistic in nature. The fact is that there is only a handful of riffs stretched over 73 minutes and it is certainly the purest pain for most listeners to bare. Moss are so damn slow that the blood in your veins can freeze in place before the next riff is played. The riffs are deep and coarse, the drumming is sluggish and rough and the sound wobbles mercilessly into your soul. The inhuman scream of Olly Pearson goes through your skin, just like a knife cutting you in a savage and bestial way.

The first track,''Ritus'', is a short journey characterized by ambient drone and it is the intro that precedes the next three behemoths. ''Subterraen'' comes in strong with one chord, it has a funeral feel to it with monolithic riffs and screams of every kind. The song is full of moments of sheer discomfort and alienation in which it is easy to wonder what is happening and what is the meaning of it all. It is like entering into a muddy swamp full of fog; you get lost, disoriented and confused when you finally find your way out of it. ''Dragged To The Roots'' is the best song of the album, it is my favorite track because it is more structured and gets you out of this drone/doom atmosphere. After 28 minutes of glorified doom, you feel relieved that there is an actual song well defined that you can listen to. Moss does not care if the song is composed of only one riff, but here they prove, just like on the next EP that they can create actual songs from beginning to end. What makes this album so fascinating is the unique atmosphere that they are capable of producing. "Gate III: Devils From The Outer Dark" offers a pitch black atmosphere, an epitome of dark magic and as you enter it, there is no way that you will see the light of day. It is the finale of this trilogy of pure darkness and merciless journey of horror.

Moss are incredibly extreme and have bought a suitable production on this album. Where other bands of this genre create long pauses between lingering chords, Moss show slowness in a velvety way because the breaks between the individual notes serve as an atmosphere of oppressive menace and psychotic disturbance. These three Englishmen have really the ultimate doom sound!!! On the other hand, I absolutely could not understand a single word that Olly screamed about, but who gives a shit from a guy who is high most of the time. I truly appreciate his effort, his screams complement the horrific sound very well and they are thrown into the mix at the right moment. If you dare to open these gates, darkness will come out and decimate all living hope.

Sub Templum is not a collection of songs put together to form an album. It's not music or even doom as you know it. Moss' second full length (stressing the word length) is more like a journey through hell than anything else. Sub Templum is not an easy album to just pick up and enjoy. It requires ritual-like devotion to consume in all its nastiness and absolute heaviness, but once you feel like you're up for an overdose of sleazy sonic horror, Sub Templum sure as hell delivers.

There aren't really any intricate ways to describe the sound of this record. It's just heavy, monolithic, crushing, and all the other usual adjectives. Dom Finbow's guitar tone is obviously ridiculously fuzzy with loads of feedback filling all the lengthy gaps between chords. Chris Chantler's drumming has loads of gaps as well, which allows him to put everything he has to each beat. In other words, the communication between guitars and drums is hauntingly telepathic and good. Olly Pearson's vocals confirm that Sub Templum is an album of terror. These evil, hateful and suffering shrieks are understandably quite scarce, but when they are summoned to accompany the instruments, Cthulu itself is pretty much conjured.

Don't expect to have any recollection about the song structures after a listen. The compositions are at times so slow that even getting a hold of a riff is very difficult. This is the case in especially the last behemoth of a song called "Gate III: Devils from the Outer Dark". Sometimes the riffs are like endless limbos of random chords and feedback where making sense of anything is hard. So, at times you simply must dump all the usual aspects of metal music and just let the atmosphere drown you. This occasional feeling doesn't make Sub Templum a drone record though. It's just so extreme doom that people tend to make that mistake. The track "Subterraen" for example is just way too doom to even consider labeling Moss a drone band. Don't.

To sum up, Sub Templum is one of those albums that really need a special time and place. An optimal soundtrack for example a candlelit bongsession with some H.P Lovecraft. Interesting fact about this record is that it was produced by Electric Wizard's Jus Oborn. His label, Witchfinder Productions, was also involved in some way. I don't know what Jus' magic touch was, but he did some great work with the Moss guys. Sub Templum is a highly recommended album for all pot obsessed doom maniacs and Lovecraftian sleazeballs. And some other selected people too I guess.

In the world of the ultra-slow and ultra-heavy, Britain's Moss have built up somewhat of a reputation on the back of a number of demos and splits, and 2005's "Cthonic Rites" which consisted of just two songs in its 66 minute duration. With the release of "Sub Templum", Moss have clearly sold out by releasing a radio-friendly 4 songs totalling 73 minutes in length, a dramatic reduction in average-length-per-song in anyone's books.

When I say radio-friendly, I of course am referring to stations prepared to play virtually the slowest form of music one could create that is actually moving, i.e. not the virtually static world of Sunn0))). For in the 73 minutes of "Sub Templum" you could, quite legitimately, point out that almost nothing has happened - for every riff is so soul-crushingly slow and so drenched in feedback and bottom-end, for every tortured scream sounds like it was recorded by someone lowering a microphone down into Hell itself, and for every hit of a drum or cymbal there is a recognisable time seperation from the ones before and after. Whether this can be classed as music at all, and if it is possible to derive enjoyment from its drudgery will depend on the listener, a situation reflected in the final score. For those who, when the moment is right, can take the torture of listening to bands like Skepticism, Thergothon or Burning Witch, then this is right up their street. The sound and feel is so utterly bleak and lifeless it simply puts most Black Metal to shame, and for once proves the promotion surrounding an album to be correct: Moss have surely created the "heaviest fucking Doom Metal Anti-Music of all time", and may quite possibly "ruin 'extreme' doom metal for everyone". Brave words indeed. Picking out select moments is difficult for "Sub Templum" requires nighttime listening with a mind fucked on drugs and a burning passion for the occult and horror, a situation I'm sure we could all guess is not conducive to indepth analysis, of, well anything. The two long songs "Subterraen" and "Gate III: Devils From The Outer Dark" (23 and 35 minutes respectively) display the greatest despair and misery but don't go thinking the other two tracks are brief windows of hope and joy - listening to those is just as likely to make you want to kill yourself, however they simply provide a shorter timeframe in which to do it.

Any mark for an album like this is utterly and totally dependent on the listener. Most will despise it and just not 'get it', but for what its worth, "Sum Templum" is brilliant. In those dark winter evenings where anything past the sonic equivalent of 3mph just won't do, this will. The intensity is unforgiving and forboding from start to finish with no let-up at all until its completion, but given its requirement of total darkness and it currently being the height of summer I am not going to be able to listen to this for a few months now. Damn. Mark very much dependent upon listener's interpretation.

Originally written for Rockfreaks.net

I hope you all realize that I am a total sucker for ultra-slow, ultra heavy doom metal. Always have been. I thought when Candlemass came out with NIGHTFALL, that was slow and heavy. Then I heard Thergothon. That was slower and heavier. Then came Disembowelment, which was both unfeasibly slow and ridiculously heavy. I loved them all. And Electric Wizard, who were not as slow but every bit as gargantuanly heavy. And so it goes...

Moss are great. I loved CTHONIC RITES, and was really looking forward to this album, and I gotta say I love it more than RITES. But I cannot, for the life of me explain why. It is, very, very slow tempo wise, sounding like it was recorded in the kind of deep pit they used to throw people into in olden times and drop rocks upon them until they were eventually killed by the blows. This took some time to happen and so does SUB TEMPLUM. If you wanna call this funeral doom, go ahead becuase it fits right in with Skepticism or Ahab, only without the forlorn melodies those bands employ. Moss here create the sound of neophytes being slowly tortured and murdered to celebrate sick but solemn initiation rituals in some hermetic, moist synagogue located somewhere in underground Scotland. I think.

But as much as I love, this, I understand that it makes most people bored shitless, and makes Reverend Bizarre sound like KC & The Sunshine band (okay, not exactly, but close). And I am a sucker for it, and you probably aren't, so approach with caution. If you love doom, though, you could do far, far worse.

Well, Moss have been around for some years, there have been some tapes and I think 7” releases, but they have not been a constantly working band that has done a lot. At some point then Jus Osborne steps in as a mentor and producer with Lee Dorian releasing an album and now they are spoken about and well-received. To me, however, they appear to be rather overrated case of hype caused by the involvement of certain personnel and some good relations. But then you also got the English press, who are said to be pretty hard on their own country’s bands, but when they suddenly decide that XY is cool, then they are their great English contribution to the crème de la crème and they all love’em.

No misunderstandings here – Moss are a good band, this is a good record! This is an intense, fucking heavy and crushing album of super slow extreme Doom along the lines of Corrupted, Bunkur and that Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine album. It got a really negative and devastating atmosphere, it produces a barren wasteland in which you’ll get lost for eternity. The guitar plays only power chords, hardly more than one every 10-20 seconds with drums in a related slow and simple manner. The vocals only consist of slow and usually long tortured screams. If you are open-minded to such music and ready for a trip through negative emptiness, then you cannot dislike this. Also there are very few bands in the same vein.

But when I compare this to a band such as Corrupted, I have to say that it’s nothing special. Wouldn’t want to say it’s boring, but it’s just not enough to be of relevance these days. If you want to play such music and seem somewhat relevant, it seems there needs to be a special element to add the icing on the cake. Like Corrupted got with the Piano in some cases and the good use of feedback and atmospheric effects, or for instance Bohren & der Club of Gore with their jazzy sound, saxophone, vibraphone and Fender Rhodes. Moss, however, lack this kind of quality and that’s why I consider them to be just a bit overrated and not that fascinating.

By common consent, Moss’ full-length debut album, 2005’s Cthonic Rites, set a horrifying new benchmark for extremity in doom metal (or as the band themselves put it, “macrocosmic caveman crust doom”), rivalled only by the likes of Catacombs, Sunn 0))) and Khanate. The album consisted of two monumental megaliths of sound, totalling an appropriately symbolic 66 minutes and 6 seconds, and the music was so cataleptically slow, so paralysingly primitive, and so ineffably evil, that it actually seemed to have been belched forth under intolerable pressure from a volcanic vent shrouded in eternal darkness at the bottom of a deep-sea trench, rather than produced by musicians in a studio with instruments.


This time around, the Southampton-based trio’s approach is a tad more refined, though still solidly saturnine. Sub Templum, like its predecessor, was produced by Jus Oborn of Electric Wizard, who shows admirable restraint in leaving the band’s noxiously basic sound largely naked and unadorned by knob-twiddlery. The press release lists the controlled substances consumed and the films watched during the recording of Sub Templum, and the latter list, containing as it does such grim and grimy grindhouse classics as 'Deathline', ‘Northville Cemetery Massacre’ and 'Last House on Dead End Street', is a fair indication of the sinister collective mindset of Moss as they set to work exhuming these works out of the primordial sludge pits where they had been slowly ripening since the Cretaceous epoch.


The album’s sarcophagus lid creaks open to the fetid strains of ‘Ritus’, which is a relatively short drone-based ambient intro piece involving e-bowed, downtuned guitar, penetrating funereal keyboards, whispered vocals and rolling waves of cymbal crashes. Thus far, this isn’t too different from what the listener might expect from the ritual ambient likes of Aeoga, Nordvargr or TenHornedBeast, but with the 23-minute ‘Subterraen’, Moss commence with business as usual. Vocalist Olly Pearson’s ghastly possessed groans are those of a frost giant shitting icebergs, Dom Finbow’s feedback-laden riffs are as heavy as the force of gravity itself, and drummer Chris Chantler keeps time like the fateful pendulum in Poe’s story. ‘Dragged to the Roots’ ensues, as inescapable as death and as barbaric as Leatherface’s taste in interior decoration.


By this point, it’s hard to remember life as it was before Sub Templum went into the CD player. It seems like I’ve been listening to this album for as long as the world has existed. I’m travelling through an endless tunnel, with no light visible either in front or behind. And it’s far from over yet. The 35-minute finisher, ‘Gate III: Devils From the Outer Dark’, is actually in three parts, ‘Walpurgis’, ‘The Coming Of 13’ and ‘Exitus Templum’, although there’s no pause between sections, one part seeping into the next. The spoken word vocals of ‘Walpurgis’ are fairly intelligibly, but in due course they give way to the anguished screams of ‘The Coming Of 13’. This part of the album resembles the ‘Báthory Erzsébet’ section of Sunn 0)))’s Black One album, with vocals from Malefic of Xasthur. After an eternity, it’s all over, and you’re left to try to reassemble the scoured and blackened fragments of your identity and get on with the rest of your life.


The sound of Moss is claustrophobic, crushing and utterly relentless. It offers no hope, no redemption, no fun and definitely no guitar solos. When the Great Old Ones return to Earth to assume their rightful dominion, Moss will be put in charge of the planetary extinction patrols. In the meantime, they will eviscerate your eardrums and rape your soul. You have been warned.


Sub Templum bears cryptic and sombre Masonic temple imagery on its cover, and it’s available as a digipack CD, or in three different limited edition vinyl versions. And with any luck, a new outcropping of Moss might mean a new tour as well. I saw them, last December, supporting David Yow’s Qui, and they were excellent, but totally misplaced on a bill of fast, angry punk rock. It’d be really interesting seeing Moss with one or two more sympathetic bands.


This review was originally written for Judas Kiss webzine:
www.judaskissmagazine.co.uk