Yeah, so you see that Stoner Rock Army logo right above this text? Well, not even the Space Skull can capture what We Follow the Earth unleashes in their debut, Lightbearer. Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF): if you love Doom on a cosmic level, but this moogerfooger NOW! Don’t even waste your time reading this Quckie review. Just buy it. Okay?
Not convinced? Cool man, ’cause I’m gonna love writing this up.
Lightbearer’s opening track, A Broken Vessel, starts out with an old-school synth that has a bit of warble in it. It sets the tone for a few seconds, then the bass kicks in. simple, effective, and dreadful. The drum beat does nothing to lighten up the mood, just a simple beat on 1 and 3. Nicely done, and pretty creepy, but it’s the spoken word that takes it over the top, catches you up on the story and sets you up for what comes next.
Simplicity like the this is usually the result of hard work and serious editing, leaving us with the bare-bones necessary to get the point across about.
“48 souls, just gone. What do I do?”
Time is indeed…strange.
Lightbearer does another nice trick by coming in with a solid drum-intro, followed by some truly gnarly-toned guitar and bass work. I gotta admit, the vocals caught me off-guard with a shouted, almost chanting cadence I usually hear in more aggressive Hard Core. It distracted me for a moment, being sensitive to vocals styles, when I imagined a poster for the album that rips off a certain move from back in the day: In Space, all you can do is SCREAM!
That’s all it took, and I was locked in for the ride, and what a ride it is. A sense of true horror or terror in music is kinda hard to pull off, but Lightbearer does it, big-time. I get a cinematic thrill listening to it. The damn thing is getting in the way of reviewing other things. I mean, there are other bands…
That’s the best thing about Lightbearer. I forget about other stuff once I’m immersed in the soundscape. There’s something about creepy, doomy space concepts that absorb me into the blackness of their vision. Spaceslug is generally my standard for that kind of trip, but We Follow The Earth has added another dimension to my outer worlds…
