Reviews list for CHRCH - Light Will Consume Us All (2018)

At first glance, Light Will Consume Us All is a nearly unremarkable album. On Metal Archives, the band is listed as doom/sludge, and the similar artists tab lists many, many other doom/sludge bands who form a similar niche that I have little interest in. There is something slightly remarkable about Chrch though, it's that they have a female singer. This is unusual for a band in this niche, does the music follow up on this?
Well, yes, and that sludge part is somewhat misleading. It takes a while before the album gets to anything resembling metal rather than just a dark ambient piece, and when it does, it's just doom. But that dark ambient is interesting, it reminds me of sludge the strongest out of the entire album, because it sounds like the clean bits from Subrosa, even though this doesn't carry over to the metal parts. It's very effective, especially once the vocalist starts kicking in. She's got a lot of the same energy Dawn Crosby did, and it really works in creating a haunting atmosphere.
At times the metal part of the equation actually makes the album worse. Not like it's a bad album because of it, but it just feels like it's there to be there. The opening track relies a lot on a more ambient sound, building up tension for the eventual metal parts. Other tracks feel like they're missing them, and while there are some nice guitar solos to compensate, those feel oddly tacked on.
Ignoring these issues, this is a surprisingly pleasant album, well worth a listen.

Firstly, I was drawn to this after seeing the cover on the homepage and decided to give it a spin, so thanks to you Ben for adding it when you did.

This 2018 album was CHRCH's second full-length album and, for me, a step up from their still impressive debut. One of the most striking strengths of CHRCH's music is the simplicity of the melodies and I don't mean that in a negative way. Despite the lack of complexity they are delivered in such a way that the effect is shattering. The opener, the twenty-minute "Infinite Return" for example, begins with a really simple melody picked out by guitar with very little distortion to produce a beautifully clear sound, accompanied by Eva Rose's clean-sung vocals for a gorgeous, calm opening that we all know just can't last. As guitar and vocals are joined by the drums, beating out a distant-sounding militaristic tattoo, the ominous atmosphere builds like gathering thunderheads. The guitar becomes increasingly insistent as the vocals get more desperate-sounding until the storm hits around the seven-minute mark and the riff crushes all before it as Eva shrieks and snarls and the drums hit the fore like a seven-pound sledgehammer. Around the midway point the maelstrom passes and a similar, but more hesitant-sounding, melody to the one at the beginning of the track is picked out and the calm returns, albeit now with a lost innocence as notes of dissonance insert themselves into this gentle refrain. This too cannot last and another, albeit more triumphal and anthemic, crescendo is reached, as if the victims of the first have now become the perpetrators of this second atrocity. What an opening twenty minutes - possibly one of my favourite slabs of doom metal ever - and a real high mark for the rest of the album to follow.

Second track Portals weighs in around the fifteen minute mark and kicks off with a weighty riff from the outset, but despite this it manages to become increasingly heavy as the track buids, filling all available space and threatening to collapse under it's own weight. Again this main riff is quite simple, but is deployed in such a way that it seems to be more complex than it actually is as the listener's mind grapples with the crushing weight of it. The vocals once more run the whole gamut from ethereal and angelic to savage and demonic. The soaring, distorted guitar solo towards the end of the track feels like the Comfortably Numb solo being torn apart and destroyed by the mass of an errant supermassive black hole. Final track Aether is the shortest at nine and a half minutes and has a riff and tone that sounds remarkably like Warning's Watching From A Distance album, at least until the last couple of minutes anyway, which are just utter madness as everything must go before album's end! Before concluding I must make mention of Adam Jennings drums, they sound phenomenal and as good as any doom drum performance I can recall. In fact, the production as a whole is superb and is a major factor in the success of the album. 

This has jumped right in as one of my absolute favourite doom albums. To use a sporting analogy, it sounds like an album where the band have "left everything on the field" and absolutely given it everything. If I had any criticism at all it would be very minor - with the epic Infinite Return up front, the rest of the album is overshadowed slightly. I would have liked to hear the running order of Portals; Aether and closing with Infinite Return ending the album with a real triumph. FFO Sub Rosa, Warning, Pallbearer and any "no fucks to give" doomhead. If you have any love at all for real doom metal then you need this album.