Smote

It’s odd to read that the inspiration for the title to Smote’s new album, A Grand Stream, arises from peaceful moments in the sun. There are quite a few feelings dredged up by Smote’s work, but few of them evoke peace or sun. The band, once a solo endeavor by Daniel Foggin, now expanded to a fuller ensemble, revels in the darkness that seeps from the bog-brewed earth. It exhumes ghosts from the long crumbled cadavers of cottages along the Scottish border, finding the point where folk begins to fray. Foggin’s works blend traditional instrumentation — creaking strings, funeral drums, somber winds — with thunderous synth work and desolate guitar to craft drone and dirge. The works here push further than Foggins has before, scratching out towering talismans of folk that unfold over two full discs.

Earth and Sunn o))) both come to mind, and Foggins has a penchant for building the kind of ravaged, haunted pastoral landscapes that the former has excelled in since Hex. Instead of tapping the West’s weathered specters, though, the record catches decidedly Highland winds. The album’s pieces thrive on repetition, turning the churn of percussion, the saw of strings, and rumble of drone into marathon lengths, peaking with the insistent singe of “Coming Out Of A Hedge Backwards” before slipping towards more fogged and fuzzed moorings on the album’s second half. The drones become grist for the riff mill at this point, letting their buzz and hum begin to become consumed by the growl of guitars set smoldering with bone-scented smoke. Smote has dug in these depths before, but the epic stretch of A Grand Stream has produced powerful and pungent results.

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