Ufomammut - Idolum (2008)Release ID: 6454
In recent years I've come to realise that my metal tastes are actually much broader than I thought. I've always been fairly clear cut when it comes to my likes and dislikes. I like death metal, but I don't like grindcore. I like doom metal, but I don't like stoner metal. etc. It's for this reason that I limit my searches when looking to discover new music to those genres / subgenres that sit in the like category, while disregarding the rest. I've always had sludge metal isolated into the dislikes column, but having challenged myself in the past couple of years to check out some of what the genre has to offer, I'm pretty sure I categorised it as a dislike without really having any awareness of what it is. Last year's Mizmor & Thou collaboration along with Primitive's Insurmountable already had me questioning my loyalties, but if this Ufomammut album is a pure sludge metal release, then sign me up to the sludge metal fan club. I'm all in!
With the exception of the drums, which have powerful clarity, the instrumentation and vocals on this release are fuzzy and sometimes distant. It's not always clear whether your hearing the bass or the guitars, as they often merge together into a wall of heavy haze. The male vocals feel like they're behind the music, or at least coming from within it, making them feel more like just another instrument than something deserving of your main focus. Even the female samples that pop up in the majority of tracks struggle to overcome the surrounding noise. Rather than being a negative though, these production choices add an immense amount of atmosphere, and make Idolum incredibly effective at what it does. There are some brilliant moments on this album. As an example, Nero's tribal drum patterns combined with psychedelic drenched doom riffs is downright amazing, but when there's a woman's voice coming through the mire, instructing me to look into her eyes and to come closer, I have little choice but to give into it / her. Stigma and Ammonia are other big highlights for me, and if it wasn't for the 27 minute closer Void / Elephantom, which isn't terrible but definitely tests my patience with it's lengthy droning centre, I'd definitely be giving this 4.5 stars.
Idolum and I have history. It was one of the many albums I played on repeat, night after night during my many stays in hotels during my days working as a consultant across the length and breadth of the UK and Ireland. Often, it was my headphones, my phone and me working long into the night on various builds of datasets, lesson plans, project plans and RAID logs for the various programmes I was across at the time. Its hypnotic and psychedelic qualities were well suited to this type of work I found, and I would say it made the often-laborious nature of the work more sustainable.
Having been a long-time fan of Hawkwind’s Space Ritual album, Idolum hit immediate comparators for me which opened it up for me more or less immediately. Just as easily as its thunderous roar could jolt me into action on any task, at the same time it had enough serenity to be able to support me entering a sufficiently relaxed state to empty my brain and be ready for a sound sleep.
The build of the opening track before it slams into the listener with the weight of one planet colliding into another sets up the experience of Idolum perfectly from the start. Although I find the album to be very well tempered and balanced there is no denying the sheer power and ferocity of the sludge elements on display here. It is an album that does not always command your full attention, therefore. However, when it wants you to stop what you are doing, it absolutely knows what to do to steer you into its colossal trajectory. As such, the album works on multiple levels, even if you decide to turn all the lights out and play it loudly or through headphones, it can give just as much reward as if you are reading, cooking etc, as it plays.
Following this record, Ufomammut dropped a single track, forty-four-minute album before bringing us the Oro duo of records in 2012, which are also records I have spent many enjoyable hours with. If you want consistency in your music, look no further than Ufomammut’s discography from 2008 to 2015. Heavy, spacey and utterly addictive psychedelic sludge/stoner/doom metal at its finest.
Idolum is an absolutely sublime mixture of sludge metal and space rock, with a psychedelic edge that gives it an almost meditative quality. First and foremost, however, it is ridiculously heavy with an almost impenetrable wall of sound that rolls over you like a landslide. The guitar tone is extremely thick and, when combined with the heaving bass it has so much bottom end that it may well shake your teeth fillings loose. The vocals are distant-sounding and to some extent irrelevant as no one really listens to an album this tangibly heavy for poetry or philosophical insight, the vocals merely add mortar to the immense wall of sound assaulting the listener's ears. There's a lineage to this album that stretches back to Space Ritual-era Hawkwind and early Pink Floyd, but it has been fed through the gravitational field of a black hole to emerge as something transformed. I don't know if music this crushingly heavy should conversely be so relaxing, but there is something about it that is mantra-like and calming and that isn't just the drone-like extended final track, Void/Elephantom, but the heavier stuff too. If you like Electric Wizard but think they are a bit lightweight then give Idolum a try!
