In Hindsight is 10/10, we revisit albums that have not received the acclaim they deserve.
For listeners in the early aughts, Old Man Gloom were an alternate reality game first and a band second. They didn’t exactly tour, so you were unlikely to come across them live. What was more likely was running headfirst into one of their albums at a record store or friend’s house and developing a festering intrigue from there, murmuring among one another, ”Is that the person from…? But, they’re playing guitar? And they’re on the other guy’s label?” In the pre-streaming era, decoding the fact that the band’s early noteworthy album was named Zozobra, but that members of Old Man Gloom were also in a separate band also named Zozobra, took a degree of detective work that, even then, hinted at the band’s playful spirit towards the norms and conventions of their scene.
The amorphous nature of the project went hand in hand with their music; in 2024, Old Man Gloom typically perform sets consisting of their sludgiest, most immediate material (they play festivals! So normcore!), but on their early recordings, metal and droning ambience played an equal part in carving out the draft facade of the band. If Seminar III: Zozobra, a single half-hour track that weaves those elements into a tight braid, represents the peak of their experiments in contrast, and 2012’s NO recasts the band as off-kilter sludge with a renewed emphasis on playing shows, then it’s 2004’s Christmas that serves as the blockbuster bridge between those two periods.
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Christmas, coming as it did at the peak of renown for related acts including Isis and Cave In, brought a lot of new eyes and ears into the Gloom, and for many of them, it served as a wonderful moment of redefinition, realizing that the world of unconventional music they’d immersed themselves in could be even weirder than they’d previously known. Dramatic and uplifting metal songs like “Gift” and “The Volcano,” given incredible concrete heft by the late Caleb Scofield, ebb away from the coiled metallic drone of “Accord-o-matic” and “Lukeness Monster,” culminating in a grandiose and stylish statement that, to this day, no one else has successfully imitated, or even really tried to. Every song here is presented as equal, and there is a clear trust in the listener to decide whether Old Man Gloom are a metal band incorporating ambience, a drone band with metal aspirations, or whether such tidy distinction actually matters at all.
Looking back on the album, it’s gratifying to see sprouts of the future focuses of the band and its members; the panels of art that accompany Christmas feature illustrations by Aaron Turner that look just like the tattoos he creates in 2024; the classic rock and heavy metal indebted guitar work of Nate Newton would further develop over subsequent OMG and Doomriders albums, and the playfulness of the song titles and liner notes (“This Old Man Gloom recording will challenge the youngsters imagination”) would be amplified by the simian stunts and online persona (a.k.a. Santos Montano) cultivated by the band in later years.
Christmas, and the brilliantly titled Christmas Eve EP that preceded it, both contain the song “Christmas Eve”, broken into sections on the latter, and presented in full on the former. On its release, this song was a kind of “My Father, My King” for people in Merzbow shirts. Placed at the end of Christmas, the band seems acutely aware of its role, showing in a single piece the breadth of the band’s stylistic toolkit: directness and expansion, bludgeoning and ascending, a culmination and a denouement. Old Man Gloom have always existed with a deliberate blur in the periphery, shifting in style, activity, and expectation. With Christmas, we’re given a fascinating chance to see them harden into a chrysalis, with full knowledge of the beast that came before, and the one that went after. It’s a lot for an ape to bear.
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Christmas is available through Old Man Gloom’s Bandcamp.
