Foehammer – S/T
Everyone talks about apps these days. There’s an app for breastfeeding, there’s an app that apps that, we think, and there’s probably an app for how many bananas you ate in the past year, we just haven’t double-checked. Well, let’s say this, there needs to be a Foehammer app. What would it do? Just play this album endlessly any time you opened it, that’s all it would need to do. Recently I (editor) have been having a lot of fun getting our baby girl into music, in fact music is one of the things she really digs, along with black and white movies for some reason. Walk her around all you want, talk to her, when she’s upset, music is what does it the best. So, after playing a show with these guys, and picking up this just-dropped sickness on vinyl, figured, hey, let’s see how she takes something heavier. She’s heard a lot already, but this has become a recent favorite for her and is almost instant nap-time induction. Her eyes go wide, her limbs go slack, her body falls to the bass. She knows, oh yes, she knows good music, and so do we, and now so shall you.
Doom’s everywhere these days, but honestly it gets easily tiresome. Everyone raves how good Dopesmoker/Jerusalem is, but they clearly were high when they listened to it. Extending a chord that goddamn long is never good. But wait dude, like Arik Roper did the reiusse art, don’t you even know? The question should have been do we even care? Let’s face it, folks, seriously, the only thing you really need to listen to by Sleep is Volume One, forget the rest, it’s all hype, and sadly hype that’s now extra-hyped with hyped art that is just another example of Frazetta worship. Christ can we have enough of this hype? Doom is filled with hype, with all of this esoteric artwork, witch references, and stuff about space. Please, just stop, it doesn’t need to be so damn stereotypical. Foehammer is thus a breath of fresh air, other than a quick fantasy reference their power and epidimozation of ‘slow’ prove that speed and the typical is entirely unecessary in doom, if handled properly and focusing on the sound. It must often be slow, but the real slow.
And this S/T is as slow as a glacier at absolute 0. If it can calm a crying newborn, it must be all powerful and all good, unlike Communism. This sickness was released in three formats, cassette and CD by the awesome Grimoire Records, and also vinyl, which we’re checking out here, via Australopithecus Records. Went with the vinyl because hey, the kid goddamn likes vinyl even though she’s only a month old, and that Philco we blast is from the 1940s plebe, we go hard, we go old. Those speakers still crush anything that’s coming out of your meager Urban Outfitters “turntable”. So we wanted to hear it through the best system we had in the house, and we’re glad we did because that bass. Foehammer deals out incredible variety in spite of how slow it is, and we’re talking Grief-level slowness that nonetheless develops, primarily because they keep the vocals low and sparse, as they kind of need to for this type of doom, while the chord clarity is corruptily loud, the drums inventive, and the bass so strong one is the new eleven. It’s only three songs long but it’s an epic trilogy in the classical sense. Powerful, poetic, moving, and something only scholars of doom will understand. Sleep on Fire n00bs be gone.
Written by Stanley Stepanic
Foehammer: S/T
Australopithecus Records, Grimoire Records
4.7 / 5
