HIGHGATE

Review from Crucial Blast:



Two years after the release of their debut album on Total Rust, Kentucky's Highgate returns with a new album of their crushing, crusty minimalist doom metal, stripped of much of the black metal that partially infested their debut, but still rife with the caustic noise that made that album so harsh and abrasive. The album features four tracks of monolithic crush, turgid black-tar dirges that stretch out for more than twelve minutes, the sledgehammer riffs repeating mercilessly over the spacious caveman pummel, with feedback/noise soaking into every inch of Highgate's sound. The first track on Shrines To The Warhead sets the mood for these endtime prophecies set to nuclear winter doom, with samples taken from a documentary on Appalachian snake-handling sects and Pentacostal faiths in the coal mining towns of Kentucky, and from there the band lurches into their bestial droning doom, the singer howling like a lunatic over their droning blackened riffs, snarling like an animal trapped at the end of a large steel pipe, his shrieks and grunts cloaked in reverb.
This is sickening, oppressive doom, in the tradition of Winter, Grief, Wreck Of The Hesperus, Toadliquor, Warhorse, but filthier, much filthier, the music slipping into a nauseating trance-state for long stretches of time, with the guitar often breaking off from the rest of the band for a few measures, playing a skeletal droning riff on it's own over and over, until the band crashes back in together, locking back into the hypnotic black crush. Bleak, intensely negative glacial punishment, with one of the only moments of relief coming at the end of "Of Ruins" when a plaintive piano appears between the cracks in the monstrous doom, a brief flash of light glimpsed over the crashing waves of bilious, black sludge, rotted power chords.