Doom bands seem to be having a boon year, and we have been inundated with several of them as of late. Today’s example, As Heavens Turn To Ash, comes to us from a stalwart of the genre, Warhorse! It’s heavy, dark, thorough, and loooooooong. Strap in, strap up, and strap it on, we are jumping down the Rabbit Hole!
Warhorse, now disbanded, was made up of Jerry Orne, Mike Hubbard, Krista Van Guilder (ex), Matt Smith (ex), Todd Laskowski (ex), and Terry Savastano. They formed in 1996, self-releasing 3 albums (Warhorse Demo, Winter Demo, and Lysergic Communion EP), then signed to Ellington Records in 2000 to release The Priestess EP, and then they finished by being signed to Southern Lord Records in 2001, who released As Heavens Turn To Ash and the I am Dying EP. Warhorse ended their union shortly after this, and Southern Lord Records has decided to re-release this depressingly doomy album again!
To strat, this album is dark and depressing, nothing retro, light, throwback, or fantastical about it. It’s a black slab of monolithic doom, an ocean of depression made of fuzz and riffs. Its only groove comes from strings made from the sinew of suicidal lovers taken too early in life. Its amazing. You will bob your head, but it won’t be with a spring in your step.
The album is just a giant haze of malodorous intent, with huge fuzz everywhere, balanced by a hot little lead in the background that is unleashed to the front of the mix to scald the listener (Lysergic Communion). The band holds nothing overly fancy, sitting in the pocket with massive grooves and heavy as hell riffs that hold the floor nicely, with simple, powerfully struck drums providing a skeleton to shuffle forth from the shadows they cast. Once they find their speed, they stay there. There are no speed runs, scale runs, string hopping, only power chords and biting blues leads that almost glow in the dark. THey don’t throw fireworks, but they melt everything in their path like a blazing furnace.
And in fairness, not exactly every song is an ode to abyssal darkness, as the shortest songs on the album, Dusk/Dawn/And the Angels Begin to Weep, are melancholic, soft acoustic/electric pauses that allow the listener to kind of re-gather themselves after the heavy tides roll back just a little. They are wonderfully written, and carry the tone of the album without resorting to the overall miasma that the rest of the long songs push. Haunting, short, and comfortable without feeling out of place.
Vocally, Warhorse is gruff. Like whisky bottles and yelling all night rough. Its as close to a true metal growl as you can get without going over into the death metal style, or sounding dumb and hokey. Its similar to Eyehategod or Haarp, and just is icing on the heavy cake (devil’s food, of course), as it brings the tone down even further. To sing this under your breath might make people think you were summoning something decidedly non-Euclidian, or at least stare really funny at you. No mistaking this for pop metal, this is dedicated to speaker destruction.
Dressed up with artwork that looks like Victorian Era artwork from the Devil’s own manse, its well rounded, leaves nothing to distract you from the bleakness at its heart, and leaves one content after listening that life isn’t imitating art and nothing is as bad as that. Its slick, its heavy, and I have absolutely no complaints about it whatsoever.
Look for it on February 24, 2015, as Southern Lord reissues this monolithic look into a spiral abyss, As Heavens Turn to Ash by Warhorse!
