August 2026 - Feature Release - The Fallen Edition
My turn for The Fallen this month and I have gone with Crawl's album "Damned" from 2023 which I recently went back to after listening to it back upon release but then l left it on a shelf. It's a droney, noisey and doomy affair and one that is not usually something that sits in my comfort zone. As always the opportunity is there to write a review or share your thoughts in the thread below.
https://metal.academy/releases/42829
I quite liked Crawl's split release with US black metallers Leviathan back in 2018 but I haven't heard anything else they've done as yet so I'm interested to see what people think of this one.
Oh yeah, this I like. I already have a review up for it, but I am gonna give it another blast before commenting.
Woah!! Come to halt there and apply the handbrake, taking the car out of gear please. Did you just say, “drone metal”? I mean, I know what that is, and usually I don’t like it, but I have been nodding along appreciatively for the past few spins of this one. Maybe we should hit play again and go around the block a few more times to make sure one of us isn’t wrong? That, or I could just admit that my tastes are broader than I thought and we can all just get on with our lives. Either way, as it turns out, Damned is a great record, whatever it is.
Before I had even picked up on the details for this one I had picked up on the Hell comparison and was therefore delighted to see that MSW was involved in the record. Crawl certainly inhabits that same claustrophobic, smothering space that Hell revels in yet at the same time I get a lot of Primitive Man in Crawl’s sound, which is equally high praise also. Considering I had never heard of Michael Engle until this release, it was surprising that his output musically was limited to this solo project and him also being the one-time drummer of a progressive sludge band called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. I can see that he also toured with Boris in 2022 on their US tour, so this is a man with some serious heavy credentials.
This combination of rattling bass and oppressive atmospheres that dredge their way through various elements of noise, doom and drone creates a unique sense of discomfort, of solid things being displaced. The opening track is little more than heavy atmosphere, but it works so well as an introduction to the rest of the album that it is in its own way, perfect. I don’t know that any of these tracks work particularly well in isolation, with my thinking being that they are best consumed as part of a whole album sitting. There are no finger buffet style pickings here, Damned is an experience to be immersed in. Herein could lie potential weaknesses for some listeners seeking a more immediate listening experience. It took me a few goes to understand exactly how to listen to Damned before its true majesty became obvious. Glad I got there though.
4/5
I don’t know that any of these tracks work particularly well in isolation, with my thinking being that they are best consumed as part of a whole album sitting. There are no finger buffet style pickings here, Damned is an experience to be immersed in. Herein could lie potential weaknesses for some listeners seeking a more immediate listening experience. It took me a few goes to understand exactly how to listen to Damned before its true majesty became obvious. Glad I got there though.
4/5
To some extent that is an observation that could be levelled at drone metal as a whole. It is a genre that relies heavily on atmosphere creation and doesn't really lend itself to today's pick 'n' mix listening habits.
I don’t know that any of these tracks work particularly well in isolation, with my thinking being that they are best consumed as part of a whole album sitting. There are no finger buffet style pickings here, Damned is an experience to be immersed in. Herein could lie potential weaknesses for some listeners seeking a more immediate listening experience. It took me a few goes to understand exactly how to listen to Damned before its true majesty became obvious. Glad I got there though.
4/5
To some extent that is an observation that could be levelled at drone metal as a whole. It is a genre that relies heavily on atmosphere creation and doesn't really lend itself to today's pick 'n' mix listening habits.
Yeah, I think that has probably been my Achilles heel with drone in general, trying to pick at it. Suggestions to “try this band” or me simply just dipping into single tracks have left me a bit confused as to what the hell is going on. Based on this feature release, I will learn to listen to any such albums in full moving forwards.
I don’t know that any of these tracks work particularly well in isolation, with my thinking being that they are best consumed as part of a whole album sitting. There are no finger buffet style pickings here, Damned is an experience to be immersed in. Herein could lie potential weaknesses for some listeners seeking a more immediate listening experience. It took me a few goes to understand exactly how to listen to Damned before its true majesty became obvious. Glad I got there though.
4/5
To some extent that is an observation that could be levelled at drone metal as a whole. It is a genre that relies heavily on atmosphere creation and doesn't really lend itself to today's pick 'n' mix listening habits.
Yeah, I think that has probably been my Achilles heel with drone in general, trying to pick at it. Suggestions to “try this band” or me simply just dipping into single tracks have left me a bit confused as to what the hell is going on. Based on this feature release, I will learn to listen to any such albums in full moving forwards.
I also believe that choosing the right time to listen to drone, or any more challenging style of music for that matter, is really important. I have found too often that since I have been checking out music from an internet nerd perspective I am sometimes listening to stuff that I am just not in the right frame of mind for, but continue on anyway and don't enjoy or appreciate it, only to return to it at a later date and wonder what I was thinking as it is actually pretty good (and sometimes vice-versa).
This was more obviously self-evident when we were reliant on physical music collections for the totality of our listening experience. Often when searching for something to listen to you would think to yourself "Nope, not in the mood for that today". Human perception can't have changed that much in thirty years, I just don't think we are as consciously aware of it as we were, or we plough on anyway because we just have to check this particular album out right now. Sometimes we just aren't in the right frame of mind for it and that is fine.
Of course, this may just be me!
I don’t know that any of these tracks work particularly well in isolation, with my thinking being that they are best consumed as part of a whole album sitting. There are no finger buffet style pickings here, Damned is an experience to be immersed in. Herein could lie potential weaknesses for some listeners seeking a more immediate listening experience. It took me a few goes to understand exactly how to listen to Damned before its true majesty became obvious. Glad I got there though.
4/5
To some extent that is an observation that could be levelled at drone metal as a whole. It is a genre that relies heavily on atmosphere creation and doesn't really lend itself to today's pick 'n' mix listening habits.
Yeah, I think that has probably been my Achilles heel with drone in general, trying to pick at it. Suggestions to “try this band” or me simply just dipping into single tracks have left me a bit confused as to what the hell is going on. Based on this feature release, I will learn to listen to any such albums in full moving forwards.
I also believe that choosing the right time to listen to drone, or any more challenging style of music for that matter, is really important. I have found too often that since I have been checking out music from an internet nerd perspective I am sometimes listening to stuff that I am just not in the right frame of mind for, but continue on anyway and don't enjoy or appreciate it, only to return to it at a later date and wonder what I was thinking as it is actually pretty good (and sometimes vice-versa).
This was more obviously self-evident when we were reliant on physical music collections for the totality of our listening experience. Often when searching for something to listen to you would think to yourself "Nope, not in the mood for that today". Human perception can't have changed that much in thirty years, I just don't think we are as consciously aware of it as we were, or we plough on anyway because we just have to check this particular album out right now. Sometimes we just aren't in the right frame of mind for it and that is fine.
Of course, this may just be me!
No, not just you Sonny. A lot of what you have written there resonates with me. In fact, it is one of the things that can make the feature releases more challenging as these are (polite) intrusions into our listening habits which do require us to go into them with an open mind, especially when the clan in question may not be one of our own choosing. I could not for example have appreciated The Revolution features probably at all last year, but now with a solid bed of hardcore punk listening under my belt they are much more valuable to me. I make it sound like I have trained my listening habits and in some way I suppose I have. Timing, mood and mindset is important, I definitely agree.
It is definitely an issue with the feature releases. I very often think, "no I really can't face that at this time" and usually give it a pass. Sometimes I plough on regardless and neither do it nor myself any service by doing so.
It's okay to give things a pass though, especially if it preserves individual contentment at the time and a review being irrelevant also. I have come to see the feature releases as an opportunity to share an album with others which is entirely at their own discretion to check out or not. The ethos of the MA is that not of it is mandatory which is why the place works so well.
It's okay to give things a pass though, especially if it preserves individual contentment at the time and a review being irrelevant also. I have come to see the feature releases as an opportunity to share an album with others which is entirely at their own discretion to check out or not. The ethos of the MA is that not of it is mandatory which is why the place works so well.
True.
Bearing in mind the above conversation, relistening to this for the first time in a little while I think I am feeling it even more than I did originally. I believe my review from the time still holds and I feel no necessity to increase my 4 star rating, it is just hitting harder this time around, which may or may not be down to mood. Anyway here is my original review:
I stumbled across Crawl and their third full-length whilst compiling the Fallen playlist and was pretty damn impressed by what I heard. Crawl is apparently the work of a single individual, Michael A. Engle who doesn't just record all the instruments separately, but, remarkably, performs bass, drums, vocals and samples simultaneously, both live and in a studio setting for a genuine one-man band experience. Damned was recorded by Hell mainman MSW twiddling the knobs and it is easy to see why he was drawn to working with Crawl as the latter has the same bleak, nihilistic vibe going on as Hell.
Musically, Damned is a mix of drone metal, black ambient and a sludgy kind of doom metal that spans four tracks with a total 37 minutes runtime. Opener, Renaissance Of Worthlessness, acts as an intro with a droning bass sound and a black ambient soundscape that conjures images of some godsforsaken charnel house setting with water running down the walls and blood pooling on the floor and where unspeakable acts of cruelty occur. After this six minutes of unsettling ambience we get into the meat of matters, ...This Lesser Form comes oozing out of the speakers with droning, heavily distorted guitar and langorous piano chords combined with chant-like samples over which Engle shrieks his fury like a banshee howling into a gale, a desperate voice facing off against an implacable force. The atmosphere produced by Crawl is one of utter darkness, very similar to the effect that MSW himself often achieves under his Hell monicker and even though the music is quite sparsely produced, it still feels impenetrably dense and crushing.
10,000 Polehammers follows a similar template, but feels even more dense than the preceeding track, the drums here being pushed quite far forward and taking a prominent position in the mix, each snare hit seemingly increasing the protagonist's suffering as he wails and howls his protestations impotently into the darkness. The cover of Damned is a black and white drawing of a medieval knight, seemingly defeated and broken down by the horrors he has witnessed rather than the enemies he has defeated and, I must admit, that is a perfect metaphor for the sound of the closing track, Poisoned and Shadowmad which is as bleak a piece of metal as you are likely to hear this year.
Damned is filthy-sounding, impenetrable, unremittingly bleak and a pretty damn great illustration of what extreme doom drone should sound like.
4/5 [80/100]