Author: Rok Klemše
Artist: Mothermound
Label: Hollow Earth
Release: year_month
Duration: 52:10
Rating: 4/5
For a full decade now, Tolmin has been home to the biggest festival on our turf, and one of the bigger metal festivals in Europe too. Metalcamp/Metaldays put Tolmin on the metal map, but the little town could never really brag about a whole lot of homegrown metal bands. In the early nineties Tolmin had Auschwitz, who soon renamed themselves In A Spleen and in 1993 put out a cult split with Obscurity, Dance With the Devil in a Pale Moonlight. When In A Spleen fell apart, metal creativity in Tolmin went quiet for a while, until Expulsion woke it up again. Their debut In These Glorious Epitaphs came out in 2001, but Expulsion, too, called it quits far too soon. Then, just under five years ago, a mother gave birth to a new child on Expulsion’s grave, and she’s inviting you into her warm but deceptive embrace. That’s exactly what Mothermound do on their studio debut, The Burden of Tomorrow.
On it, Mothermound logically carry on the Expulsion story, only far more polished and thought-out. Genre-wise they’re caught between heavy, doom and death metal, but pinning the Tolmin crew down to just those niches would be unfair, because their one-of-a-kind sound also plays with moves from rock and grunge, and the flow of this fifty-odd-minute debut, with all its complex twists and swells, calmly but surely steers them into progressive metal waters too. But Mothermound’s progressiveness doesn’t hide in a thousand notes played in a hundredth of a second, in wanking around with countless rhythm and tempo changes, or in a hundred forced (and forced-on-you) music theories. The Burden of Tomorrow is a thrilling musical journey first and foremost thanks to outstanding instrumental playing, above all the guitar harmonies that intertwine like the roots of ancient trees, the unexpected turns and a tight rhythm section. And it’s precisely the guitar work that lifts Mothermound above the shackles of genre, since the two guitarists aren’t afraid to reach for lines that are in no way classically »metal«, and at moments even recall the Seattle bands, Alice In Chains first among them. So Mothermound sometimes roar and rage like the rapids of the Soča, while the calmer parts sound like the hush before a storm, and what really sets them apart is how unpredictable the flow of the music is, surprising you with something unexpected at every turn and bend. The rhythm section handles it brilliantly, with a job that’s more than just following the guitar riffs and vocals, since it occasionally joins them in »jam« escapades. Bass and drums are both lively and interesting the whole way through, and what could stick in the ears of the wider masses is above all the one-of-a-kind vocal performance, which is simply one of those you either love or hate. There’s no middle ground. The vocals range from almost In A Spleen-style suffering, to death metal roaring, to melancholic sorrow, all the way to melodies that are sometimes metal and other times grunge. Janez Zega’s voice is best described with what art circles call the aesthetics of the ugly.
The whole fifty minutes of the album is soaked in an effective atmosphere of the sinister and the unknown, and Mothermound reach out like the touching fingers of man and god on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, touching what is truly divine. Human imagination and individuality. The Burden of Tomorrow is like the roar of lions, the howl of wolves and the fury of a stormy sea, the eternity of nature, still beyond human understanding. The mythological being Los, one of the central figures of the world built by the eternal William Blake (whose body of work is one of the band’s main guiding lights), spoke words in the famous work Jerusalem that describe perfectly what Mothermound do on their debut: »I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s. I will not Reason & Compare; my business in to Create.« And Mothermound’s »business« is creating something one of a kind.
Lineup
Janez Zega – vocals, bass
Miha Jukič – guitar
Tomaž Orač – guitar
Martin Čujec – drums
Production
Mothermound
Tracklist
1. Aurora Awaken
2. Come the Moonlight, Come the Rain
3. Lady Violet
4. Beings Beyond Being
5. A Murder of Angels
6. Dogma Defiled
7. Omega Omnipresent
8. The Path I Cross
9. Curtains Fall
