Crawl (USA) - Damned (2023)^{Release ID: 42829}

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 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.