Reviews list for Thergothon - Stream From the Heavens (1994)

Low-Fi, Extremely slow, Early Ominious Funeral Doom approaching drone metal. 

I appreciate again that this was an early landmark, but we have better options now. That being said this album does have an extremely strong atmosphere, and if what it does hits for you then you're going to have a good time with it. I need a little more guitar, and a little more catch. 

Exploring early funeral doom is fast becoming my favourite way to relax.  It really is testimony to the knowledge of the creator of this clan challenge (The Fallen: Doom Metal - The Early Days) as to how good an introduction to the clan this list of releases is.  Until recently I had only really listened to Bell Witch's Mirror Reaper as my only regular experience of funeral doom.  Understanding where the whole sub-genre that influenced that record comes from is a real treat.  As with my review of Winter's Into Darkness, I find the sheer simplicity of Thergothon's Stream From the Heavens to be remarkable in the sense of the immersive atmosphere that it creates.  Not that Winter's debut was dripping with high production values, but Thergothon's debut sounds like it was recorded in a basement somewhere in their native Finland.

What makes this album more remarkable is that there was only three members who recorded all this.  Sharing vocal, keyboard and guitar duties across all three of them (with drums handled solely by Jori Sjöroos), Stream From the Heavens is a real team effort.  This is not only dripping in atmosphere folks, it is heavy as fuck as well.  It takes the blueprint of Into Darkness and ramps up the weight dramatically.  The funeral atmospheres are serviced brilliantly by the almost black metal vocal style that sits alongside those dreary clean vocals (that also have a fair amount of spoken word alongside them).  These grim and deathly croaks add a real dimension to this record and are perhaps my favourite part of the whole experience.

I guess my only mystery here is why this album is called Stream From the Heavens when this sounds like it comes up from the opposite direction altogether.  Consistently, the record pulls you further and further into the agonisingly slow and dense atmosphere that it creates without making the whole experience feel like it goes on for too long.  At a shade under 41 minutes, this album is a perfectly palatable slab of music that never feels like it outstays its welcome.  It is bizarre how such fetid sounding vocals and crushing riffs can relax me so much but this album replaces any weight on my shoulders with a much different and more interesting weight I guess.

Extremely raw yet pioneering funeral doom metal both crushingly slow and beautiful.

There are often arguments regarding who exactly was the granddaddy of each metal genre. Was Bathory really the main instigator of black metal or were Venom the ones to kick it off? Should Death be considered the pioneer of death metal or did Possessed beat them to the punch? But when it comes to funeral doom metal, there's never any doubt that Thergothon were the instigators. Their debut EP was released in 1991 and the only band I can come up with that even remotely resembled this insanely and destructively slow doom metal would be Winter, whose 1990 release Into Darkness can certainly be considered an influence here, if not exactly funeral doom metal. The fact that it took Thergothon 3 years to follow up Fhtagn nagh Yog-Sothoth with a full-length album and yet no other band followed in their footsteps in between, shows how far ahead of the pack Thergothon were.

But rather than focus on how important Stream From the Heavens is historically, I've spent the last couple of weeks finding out just how good it is. The production is bad, but I can't say it lessens the experience at all. The guitars are for the most part just a buzz of distortion. The drums are kind of distant and murky, as are the growling vocals. But then occasionally some other sound will filter through (such as the beautiful acoustic guitar on The Unknown Kadath in the Cold Waste) and the effect is damn blissful. While the band tend to plod along in an extremely down-tuned abyss for most of the album, there are little melodies and clean vocals that transcend the darkness without ever letting go of the truly despondent atmosphere. It's pure funeral doom metal the way many bands still play it today and a great listen 15 years later after its conception.

Even though I obviously have a lot of praise for the album, I'm not going to give it full marks. I think funeral doom has taken further steps since and bands such as Skepticism, Esoteric and Shape of Despair have exceeded this initial blueprint in terms of production and song writing. But I will always be thankful for any band that helped to put this wonderful style of music on the map and find Stream From the Heavens to be a satisfying listen in its own right. Highlight tracks are Everlasting, Yet the Watchers Guard, The Unknown Kadath in the Cold Waste and Who Rides the Astral Wings. I see Peaceville has reissued this important relic once again this year, so it seems likely to remain the underground treasure that it is for a long time yet.

Recorded in 1992 by Finland's Thergothon but not released until '94, a year after they split up, Stream From the Heavens represents the primordial ooze from which the funeral doom genre pulled it's hulking bulk. Taking Winter's pioneering death doom and slowing it even further, to a barely perceptible heartbeat, this was the origin of doom metal's most melancholy of all sub-genres. The production is quite poor, but doesn't affect the album overly. The music is minimalist and glacially slow with subdued, sustained guitar chords and plodding drum beats, but there are some interesting tonal variations, such as the thin-sounding organ that occasionally brings to mind the theremin sound often heard in 1950's science fiction movies and the trade off between the growling, sulphurous main vocal and the reedy and washed-out clean vocal (that weirdly sounds like The Velvet Underground's Nico if she was male!)

I think it's fair to say that although funeral doom has advanced (certainly technically) in the 25 years since it's release, this is a truly original album in the development of extreme metal and there has never really been a release quite like it neither before nor since.