Cough - Still They Pray

Angry Metal Guy

There comes a time in life when you need to walk away from something for a little while to appreciate what you have. Whether it’s painting, turning wood, or writing music reviews, you eventually reach a point when you have to step away from what gives you life in order to recharge and attack it with renewed focus and energy. Playing in a band is no different. Being crammed in a tiny van, hauling your gear across the country, and functioning on very little sleep while spending the nights spooning with your fellow bandmates is not one’s idea of a great time, even if the pay-off of playing live and getting your music heard offsets this. Virginia’s Cough took a much-needed five year break after touring for their last album, 2010’s Ritual Abuse, and are back with their first for Relapse, the ominously titled Still They Pray, and if anything, the time off did them a world of good.

Opener “Haunter of the Dark” lurches forth with a dirty Sabbath-on-quaaludes riff that carries on for a few minutes before the drums kick in and bassist Parker Chandler (Windhand) starts screaming in anguish. Having never heard this band prior, I kept reading comparisons to fellow doom metallers Pallbearer, but this couldn’t be a more inaccurate comparison if they tried, because if Pallbearer is the mopey-yet-hopeful honor student looking to win hearts, then Cough is its older brother who’s completely given up on optimism and adhered strictly to a diet of classic Sabbath, YOB, and Electric Wizard‘s first few albums. This is doom without hope, and Cough do a damn good job of conveying unrelenting heaviness between the riffs of David Cisco and Brandon Marcey, as well as the pummeling drums of Joseph Arcaro.

That feeling of hopeless suffocation permeates throughout Still They Pray with varying degrees of success. Immediate follow-up “Possession” has one of the best drum fills this side of Bill Ward about halfway into the song’s ten-minute run time. Penultimate track and album highlight “The Wounding Hours” contains Chandler’s most anguished howls, the saddest guitar melodies, and the most methodical pacing I’ve heard all year, all set atop of an organ, and is a strong Song o’ the Year candidate. When Cough are running on all cylinders and keep their focus, Still They Pray makes for an incredible listen, and puts them in good company with other American doom metal bands.

But there’s a problem, and it’s a big one. The songs all go on for too long, taking a great idea and drilling it slowly into the ground. “Let Me Bleed” would be a stronger song had a few minutes been shorn off of its nine-minute length. Instrumental “Shadow of the Torturer” is torturous at over ten minutes. Also, closer “Still They Pray,” an acoustic ballad, would be better served if it were placed elsewhere in the album’s track listing, as it doesn’t make for a good closer. Luckily, the production by Electric Wizard‘s Jus Oborn is warm and fuzzy, especially in the guitars and bass, without suffering from too much compression.

Despite some of the qualms I have with Still They Pray, I did enjoy parts of my time with the album. It’s long in the tooth, sure, but some of my favorite doom metal bands could use some editing as well in that department. It might not be my pick for essential doom, but you could do far worse, and “The Wounding Hours” must be heard at least once. Here’s to more from these guys.

Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Relapse Records
Websites: cough.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/Cough666
Releases worldwide: June 3rd, 2016

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Pitchfork 76

Despite the torpid, brooding doom metal they make, Cough began in something of a hurry. During its first five years, the Richmond quartet issued an auspicious debut EP, a split LP, and two very strong full-lengths, which colored the bleak grays of doom and the lurid greens of stoner metal with rainbow swirls of psychedelic rock. They jumped to Relapse Records, the giant of their field, for 2010’s menacing Ritual Abuse and, suddenly, went silent. One reason for the pause is the success of Windhand, Cough’s slightly-more-sophisticated and cryptic kin. Cough singer and bassist Parker Chandler handles the low-end rumble of that hard-touring and highly productive unit, limiting his time to return to his older band’s harder core. Indeed, a split between the two is all that Cough has released since 2010—at least until now, thanks to the band’s first album in six years.

Never mind the gap, actually: Still They Pray could have arrived anytime during, say, the last three decades and placed Cough alongside the ranks of Candlemass or Cathedral, Sleep or Saint Vitus. It's not looking to dovetail with or participate in any modern scene or moment so much as gather and glorify the tropes of aged genres. They are scary and mean like Eyehategod, hook-driven and magnetic like Electric Wizard. During these seventy minutes, Cough incorporates samples of Lovecraft text, spins into knotty solos, grinds riffs into dust, rages through a splendidly lysergic instrumental, and closes with benighted acoustic blues. When Chandler sings, he seems to inhale and exhale some cocktail of weed and hellfire smoke, as interested in sweet leaf as he is black masses. Still They Pray is a righteous echo of its classic forebears, turned way up and delivered with gospel-like belief.

For their first two albums, Cough handed production duties over to Sanford Parker, the hyper-productive Chicago musician and session overlord who’s worked with many of the most vital American metal acts of the last two decades. For their return, though, Cough went with Jus Oborn, the Electric Wizard leader and a bona fide titan in the form. He helmed these sessions alongside Windhand guitarist Garrett Morris.

The move to Osborn opens up the band’s sound, revealing layers and depths that Parker often pushed toward the middle. During “Possession,” for instance, Oborn meticulously layers the dual guitars of David Cisco and Brandon Marcey, a pair that’s perfected its balance of mantra-like repetition and howling solos. And he brilliantly divides the nine-and-a-half-minutes “Let It Bleed” into two distinct phases, so that the first half suggests some salvaged grunge obscurity, with mumbled vocals about nihilism and low-key, highly muffled guitars. But after an instrumental interlude, Cough charges back twice as loud, the guitars and Chandler now screaming in delirious, demented tandem. It ties together two ends of Cough’s inspirations and ideas.

For the eight minutes of mid-album highlight “Masters of Torture,” Cough pivots between low-tempo, high-distortion terror, rippling blues solos, and mutated-and-drugged thrash. It’s a clear composite of antecedents, a distillation of heroes that’s obvious but no less compelling for being so blatant. Cough slows down one last time in the final minute, and Chandler—voice warped by a web of effects, as if singing from inside a tomb—begins to chant a koan: “Live to hate/Hate to live,” he yells, repeating it until the riff dissolves into feedback. This grim perspective on reality represents a time-honored, timeless thesis for bands like Cough, whose central obsession with demons, death, and the romance of the underworld is, ironically, bound to outlive them.