Loather - Eis

Angry Metal Guy

It’s funny that as the UK experiences a heatwave, I am writing about an album called Eis (Ice). Contrasting the cool summer breeze with the ferocious wind of blackened blastbeat barrages. Juxtaposing the clear blue skies with a grey mist of echoing feedback. Opposing the heat that has everyone spontaneously organizing a barbecue with cold, depressive atmospheres and morose vocals that make you want to stay inside and watch the rain. Responsible are Viennese four-piece Loather, and this is their debut, though they’ve been around since 2016, dropping EPs and sharing stages with the likes of Wiedegood and Ultha. One can definitely hear the resemblances and influences of such band on Loather’s sound—a shifting mixture of black, sludge, and doom metal that’s just as likely to sound ferocious and terrifying as it is folksily mournful and bleak.

Though on paper, the mixture of styles running through Eis could come across as jarring, somehow Loather make it work. The folk-like plucking and doomy trudging ramps up very naturally into bouncy black metal (“Mortuary,” “Proper Burial”), and the latter sinks gracefully into softly ambient post-rock (“Holler Your Name”). We begin in “Ephemeral” with a series of distorted, spine-chilling screams that recur later as true howls echoing over a spunkily energetic number reminiscent of Wormwitch. We end with “Proper Burial”‘s melodic blackened folk, with a twanging Western American sensibility that calls Wayfarer to mind. Between—and within—these tracks tempos flow from doomy sways to blastbeats, to shuffling, scattered space-making. What joins it all together is the omnipresent haze of the production. Leaving both clean and harsh vocals echoing menacingly or moodily; shrouding tremolos in fuzzy blankets and granting bass plucks a weighty resonance; giving everything a humming grittiness. This gives the record a sense of coherence, but its very prevalence might present a barrier to some listeners.

Eis by Loather

Eis has atmosphere in droves. This arguably sees its peak in some of the cleaner sections of stripped-back plucking and lonely refrains (“Holler Your Name,” “Lost Sight”) or pulsing synth and delicate strums (title track) where rueful singing resounds. But it’s also more than a mere shadowy presence at heavier moments of these tracks and others (“Ephemeral,” “Mortuary”) as shrieks ring against muted, clustered riffing. In fact, the aforementioned howling, blastbeating passage of “Ephemeral” might be one of my favorite parts of the album. The atmosphere, then works in two somewhat opposing directions, giving an old-school frosty bleakness to the fast and heavy, a post-metal sadness to the not-so-heavy. And Loather’s golden mean lies somewhere between, some combination of these two extremes. Poetically, that mean happens to fall in Eis’ actual middle with “Mortuary,” though it’s also scattered in choice moments elsewhere. When tortured screams meet with slower, swaying rhythms, duet with reverb-soaked cleans, overlaying melancholic melodies. When thrumming atmospheres allow black metal fury and whispering dejection to strike with potency and poignancy respectively. This is Eis at its true iciest, the iciness of cold heartbreak and solitude.

Not everything can be so perfect, however. When Loather go easy on the edge, the power wanes. This leaves the initially eerie singing in “Lost Sight” to grow flat as its minimalism extends beyond its reach, while the pulsing monotony of the title track feels a little nothingy by the end. But even when they don’t, their production choices don’t always work—specifically, that humming, echoing grit. It drains the passion out of lead melodies (“Holler Your Name,” “Lost Sight,” “Proper Burial”) burying them beneath feedback and making them wishy-washy in the blur. Eis’ most vitriolic moments, which successfully communicate their ire (“Ephemeral,” “Mortuary”) work because Loather use atmosphere and fuzz to accentuate but never conceal the music.

It’s clear what Loather were going for—an oppressive bleakness—and Eis manifests this well. Even if not devastating, it is at times powerfully poignant, and miserable, and even vicious. There is more than enough ice here to chill you and more than enough feeling to shake you. At the very least, Eis won’t leave you cold.

Rating: Good
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Vendetta Records
Websites: loathermusic.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/Loatherband
Releases Worldwide: June 23rd, 2023

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