Album Review: Slow Worm - The Inverse Ascent

Climb into the self

Doom metal is a rather tricky genre in our current age. There are many bands that think just being slow and having a thick sound is enough obviously this approach delivers very meagre results. Yet it seems that many people in the scene just eat it all up. In fact it sometimes seems that save for a few exceptions the less adventurous and more monotonous a band the more popular they get. Personally I find this kind of frustrating and disappointing. Hence before I listened to The Inverse Ascent I was kind of sceptic. Luckily for me it turned out to be a much more interesting and dynamic record than I expected.

Slow Worm take elements from various different styles of doom. There are some parts that remind me of a less boring Warning but also parts that remind me of Reverend Bizarre and Candlemass. There are some brief references to black metal with some brief passages of black metal style shrieks but most notably the faster final part of the third track. According to what I've read many associate the clean parts throughout this album with shoegaze and post-rock but to me they mostly remind me of Disembowelment. Just listen to the way the vocals and clean guitars are combined on the third track. I have to say that this album is not nearly as dynamic as Transcendence. They manage to structure everything they have quite successfully into a coherent whole that save for the aforementioned fast part on the third track stays down tempo.

What I like is that it actually is a fairly short album. There are 3 real doom metal tracks and the final track is an ambient outro giving us a total runtime of just under 40 minutes. They really seem to have focused on only using their best ideas and while I would not say that their ideas are world class this approach does make sure that they get the most out of themselves. The vocals however strike me as an acquired taste. I do like them because I think they have character but I can definitely imagine that some people could consider it a weak point

I think I can best summarize this album as effective. It's ideas are not good enough to turn this album into a classic but because they get the most out of every element it ends up being a quite enjoyable listen with enough character to stand out from the crowd.
Final score: 79/100

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