Time Signature Doom comes crushing...

Genre: sludge / doom metal

After a long period of hiatus, the Floridan doomsters in Floor decided to get back together and make music again in 2010, and, having landed a deal with the mighty label Season of Mist, they released their third album (and first album in ten years) this April.

Entitled Oblation the album contains primarily extremely heavy tracks revolving around simplistic crunchy riffs, performed on downtuned instruments. Thus, the opening track is a minimalistic stomping affair oozing slugde and dripping doom, which also applies to the hypnotic yet rather brutal 'Trick Scene', while 'The Quill' draw on more traditional doom metal akin to early Cathedral, combining this influence, with noise rock, and 'Find Away' is strangely melodic. The album is not merely a display of slowness and heaviness. Tracks like 'Rocinante' and the instrumental 'The Key' are upbeat, and 'Raised to a Star" is pretty much an all out crust punk attack.

With music this crushingly heavy and minimalistic, once should think that it would not be very easy to get into, but it is actually surprisingly accessible. It don't know if it is the inherent melodicism underlying most of the riffage or whether it is the clean and considerably melodic vocals, or perhaps it is the fact that the songs on this album are generally not very long and thus do not become as tedious as many sludge songs otherwise tend to.

In any case, fans of crushingly heavy music should definitely check out this album, and – of course – if you are a fan of Floor, you have probably waited fourteen years for this album, so there really is no reason to wait any longer. You might as well purchase it right away, because Floor is back!

(review originally posted at seaoftranquility.org)