Sloath
Deep Mountain

THE REVIEW

Sloath are a sickly, unwholesome, long & short haired five piece from the south coast of England, brought together by a mutual desire to play the slowest, loudest and heaviest music possible using guitars, bass, drums and chat-like vocalisations.

So they present themselves on the bandcamp page of their first album. This and not much else have I happened to read, like that Deep Mountain from 2014 is the second album and that they opened for people like the Acid Mothers, among various Om and Bardo Pond. All in almost total anonymity, in fact, I am grateful to @[Festwca] for mentioning them to me a few days ago. Sleep left to age ten years in honey, therefore psychedelia that is amiably rough and elongated to the point of nervousness, which can exist for some similar reason:

• because the bees made the honey in the skull of the lion;
• because beard and mountain always pair well.

I would depict the listening experience as finding oneself near mountains that overwhelmingly speak as one is intent on climbing them slowly, progressing effortlessly with a measured andante moderato step on the adagio. Sometimes even excessively measured, Deep Mountain is a sort of doom as colorful as it is catatonic, an stoner dissolved in a drone.

------> step forward and walk, come on <-------

Juvis Priestly is the opener, and starting decisively fast (alright, fourth gear), it decidedly masks the true slow-motion nature of the album, which not even arriving at Legs traps between distorted reverberations and sonorous mantras with blues traits. The Toucher is a slow-motion landslide and in all this, one even gets to breathe a bit of sludge. Beyond halfway through the album, trance states permitting, the mountains unfortunately do not seem to have gotten any closer, and here’s an image I have of the album: you listen to something that seems never-ending. And thinking back to those mountains, they are so big that you consider sand only as very small stones, then the tracks simply become large structures that are collapsing, slowly.

I don't know what the right speed of time is, but this isn’t bad every now and then.

LP