After a year which has taken so much it’s a real treat to find a “lost” track from one of 2020’s top Metal albums. The track? Godthrymm single The Vastness Silent. The album? The expert Doom Metallers’ debut Reflections (still popping up in Top 20s and Albums Of The Year lists even as we ponder the wreckage of what we’ve left behind and look ahead with any optimism we can muster).
Few bands rattled my lockdown cage quite like Godthrymm. Salved my wounds, reached out to my darkest despair. Is a trouble shared a trouble halved, even if violently cleaved in two? Well, here’s the 100% proof.
To say The Vastness Silent was “lost” might be pushing it – rather it seems it “wasn’t finished in time” for Reflections. It certainly wouldn’t have been out of place on the album, and recalls Godthrymm’s powerful, epic, expansive modus operandi, with chief personnel present and correct – Hamish Glencross, formerly of Doom stalwarts My Dying Bride (as well as Vallenfyre and Solstice), on guitars and vocals … old “Bride” team-mate Shaun “Winter” Taylor-Steels on drums … with bassist Bob Crolla making up the current trio.
The boys’ now familiar strategy involves riffs solid enough to found fortifications on, pace as controlled and deliberate as a master granite engraver, superior vocals, the soaring, arcing, chiming, lead guitar an exultant counterpoint to the black morass, often lurching towards a two-footed double bass drum-driven climax.
The instantly engaging Vastness opens at a real lick with Taylor-Steels’ super skins work complementing Crolla’s rumbling but never stumbling contribution, like a quick brown fox jumping over a not-so-lazy bass dog. That double bass drum power show kicks in as early as the first verse and, from there, things surge and shimmer along nicely. After a chance to draw breath for a pair of carefully poised pauses and some more massive riffage, His Bob-ness has the final word.
This new digital single also includes a reworked, freshly recorded version of We Are The Dead – now re-monikered We Are The Dead (And Dreaming). This was the closest Reflections got to a pure singalong with a full-on guitar attack and a keening, spiralling solo. The new Dead boasts some nice variations on the original plus added cello, no less.
If you haven’t already, check out the album – it’s one for the ages, one for the rampages, one for the spillages, one for the courageous.
By Callum Reid
The Vastness Silent is out on Profound Lore Records