Smote

The last few years have proven fertile for Smote, conjuring up an album a year and a bonus live one too as he’s come under the umbrella at Rocket Recordings. Songs From The Free House continues Daniel Foggin’s commune with nature, five more deep dirges that rumble under the bedrock and burrow deep into the rivulets and roots of English apocalyptic folk. The new record finds Foggin free from the home studio, instead forging a larger scale version of his scarred vision at Blank Studios with Sam Grant (Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs), featuring a few contributions from his live band and Lankum’s Ian Lynch. Even with some assistance, though, this is still a monastic enterprise, sequestered ruminations and incantations that are filed with firelight and distant thunder.

Folk is perhaps a complicated signifier here. Often clouded in the calamitous smoke of ruins and runes, the record wields the ritualistic pound of drums and the scented curl of flutes, setting them among a nest of drones and howling guitar. Where some might see psych and metal, Smote still finds the thread of folk; the lowland connection to the Earth, the twilight offering to the skies. The themes that took shape over the last few records become more realized here, a more cinematic seance than Foggin has conjured in the past. Foggin wraps the wrath of Sunn around fated figures from Misommar and Wicker Man, turning in a score to sacrifice that’s as harrowing as he’s ever been. Smote’s run up to Songs From The Free House has been impressive, but the new record feels like he’s turned a corner towards some of his most accomplished works yet.

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