If Undersmile’s snail-like tempo is too slow for you, stop now. On debut album Unavailing (Dry Cough), Nottingham duo Bismuth coats that pace in a warm yet evil fuzz, every chord bringing the world crashing down around your ears with a weight similar to a Sea Bastard riff.

What the listener will find here is that the ingredients and tension build ever so gradually until the willing victim is uncomfortably writhing in their seat. Opener ‘Tethys’ does all of this yet closes with a delicate, lamenting final movement: extremely reminiscent of the aforementioned Undersmile, but with Tanya Byrne’s smooth harmonies more in tune with Windhand’s Dorthia Cottrell.

A sparingly picked, torturously slow acoustic riff leads the ensuing ‘Of the Weak Willed’, and for the first half of this sixteen-minute epic that’s really all that happens. Then comes the slightest change, a crawling increase in volume; and the hushed, singular drumbeat of Joe Rawlings that’s been whispering in the background for some time, alongside a mournful intonation, is suddenly very noticeable. Here is the magic of this hidden gem of a band: by the track’s three-quarter point, where the crushing mass and Byrne’s guttural screams are seamlessly and almost surreptitiously reintroduced, the increase in pressure has been so smoothly executed that it’s been with you like an old friend by the time you realise it’s there.

Following sinister, solitary drumbeats, the odd, sporadic bass notes of ‘The Holocene Extinction’ begin that building process all over again into a crawling, horrific echo: the riff city-levelling, the rasping howls a seduction into Hell. Closer ‘Solitude and Emptiness’ is the oddity of the set: its hypnotic beats and oscillating, pulverising pummel being of a slightly faster ilk and disembowelling from the off, the second period’s return to a slower template still crushing yet evoking the spirit of the track’s title.

Silence is often a great thing and, for us Low-end freaks, it’s an essential part of the listening experience. It augments this delightfully horrific album, another cracker from the Dry Cough stable and an exercise in creative perfection. Rest assured it will warm the cockles of those who love their riffs to be colossal and their aural terror to be slooooowww…

 

8.0/10

PAUL QUINN