Gavran - Indistinct Beacon

Angry Metal Guy

Submitting a new metal record for review in December is a hard row to hoe. The List Industrial Complex is gaining critical velocity, which means folks in our position are re-listening to the albums that most impressed us over the last 11 months and catching up on the highly regarded albums we haven’t yet heard. Unless you’re bringing your A game – or maybe the A game of a better band than yours – there’s a really good chance your album is going to be underwhelming by contrast. It’s not that we won’t consider the work on its own merit, it’s just that we’ll be more immediately able to identify any flaws. This isn’t always the case, of course. Sometimes December releases come out of nowhere to remind us that list season is an artificial construct and a good album is never late, Frodo Baggins, nor is it early. It arrives precisely when it means to. Dutch sludge doom band Gavran boldly present their sophomore full-length Indistinct Beacon this first week of December, the official start of EOY activity. Will they make a lasting impression?

Gavran occupy the same post-y sludge doom space as bands like YOB and Amenra, but lean harder into clean doom-gaze passages than either of those bands. Each of the five songs on Indistinct Beacon hovers right around the 10-minute mark and follow the same basic progressions of thick sludge to clean, repetitive passages and back again. Principal songwriter Jamie Kobic’s harsh vocals have a particularly ragged sound to them, contrasting sharply with his vibrato-less cleans, which are frequently drawn out into long, trance-inducing notes over the steady plodding of drums, as on “Duhovi.” Gavran’s approach to riff craft is bare bones, serving to reinforce pacing and atmosphere more than making a memorable groove.

Indistinct Beacon by Gavran

If you read the above paragraph and thought “that sounds tedious,” I agree. As much as I’m a fan of the style Gavran play, their take on it lacks the skillful flourishes and unique viewpoints of their touchstones. The build-and-release dynamic of post-metal doom is all about a subtle grasp of timing, but each song’s pacing is so uniform that compositional transitions are rendered arbitrary. There are plenty of quiet/loud moments across Indistinct Beacon, but they come across as rote and repetitive. In the promo materials, Gavran cite 40 Watt Sun as a songwriting influence. While they share the forlorn clean vocal repetition, Patrick Walker’s unique timbre is what really makes those songs hit emotional highs. By contrast, Kobic’s delivery is considerably less forceful and much more generic. I spend most of the drawn-out clean sections waiting for the harsh vocals and distortion to come back. This wait can seem interminable. “Talas” is a case-in-point, as Kobic chants “A gray sky shifting to black, a storm rising” over and again, and any momentum the album has gained to that point drains out the bottom.

It’s not all bad news on Indistinct Beacon. If you’re a fan of sludge, Gavran nail that all-important combination of thick ‘n’ chunky guitar tone with harsh vocals ragged enough that you’ll find yourself reflexively clearing your own throat. It’s well and truly heavy when it wants to be, and the band would do well to lean more into that and less into ethereal faffing. The pastiche of post/sludge/doom is played well enough that if you’re not focusing too hard on it, you can nod along pleasantly, but this is definitely a case of damning with faint praise.

Indistinct Beacon falters because of indistinct vision. There’s no spin or point of view that puts elbow room between this and any other band that plays loud/soft/loud sludge doom. On top of this, an over-reliance on shaky clean vocals and airy guitars prevents the stronger material from rising to the top. Back to the problem of December releases, if you find yourself short on time as you try to cram in the best of 2022, this is one you can skip. That said, fans of this style might want to give it a cursory listen.

Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Dunk! Records
Websites: gavran.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/gavranband
Releases Worldwide: December 2nd, 2022

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