It’s not terribly often you hear the frontier of the Rocky Mountain region imbued in metal bands’ work, from the area or otherwise. Maybe because it’s hard to nail – how far can you go without it morphing into hard country rock or something similar and losing its edge? What’s the minimum limit so it sounds like it has that identity and doesn’t lack anything? Jury’s out on both questions, but I can tell you that Denver’s In The Company Of Serpents have become the prime example of this modality with their new album.
Not a total stranger to the band, but it has been a while since I’ve put boot to dirt in their neck of the woods, so reacquainting myself with them has felt like reconnecting with a friend after years apart with new stories to share and a new light in their eyes stoked by growth and experience. As I look out the window at a dusky summer gloom draping over my neighborhood, I find myself in the perfect atmosphere to get a few runs through A Crack In Everything, the band’s newest LP officially breaking ground tomorrow, July 11, but premiering in full today for y’all because we’re just that fortunate to get cool opportunities like that. Enjoy swaths of doomed-up Western sludge metal by pressing play on this beast:
In The Company Of Serpents so expertly combine the heft of doom and the general ambience of Colorado and the Mountain region it’s in. It takes a palmful of dirt and smacks it on the haunches of their metal music to grit it up. The thing is, this band has alluded easy classification for quite some time, something we revel in showcasing as a general rule. Often like in “Buzzard Logic”, you’ll head Windhand-esque melodic breaks, others like “Until Death Darkens Our Door” has the acoustic guitar and general timbre of instruments call out to the folky Western wilderness, capturing a rugged sense of adventure that I personally – having lived thirty-ish years under the stars of Colorado – feel deeply on the precipice of myself. I mean, I am/was a suburban kid, but I’ve always been flanked by the metro area’s vast and arid fields up and down the I-25 corridor with the hills of the Flatirons near Boulder always within sight from my home, knowing that unpredictable expanse is never long away.
“Don’t Look In The Mirror” is a rousing intro for A Crack In Everything, Grant Netzorg’s vocals howling akin to Al Cisneros (Sleep) as if he were several football fields away from you and yet, away from the noise pollution of so-called advanced civilization, you can hear him clearly. Or what about his guitars in “A Patchwork Art”, the riff of which stationing itself so neatly between the grime of desert rock and the twang of country accents. “Delirium” and “Tremens” separate the album’s loose three acts from each other as interludes that smack of the intimate connection with the wilderness I found in Nechochwen‘s latest album – big thanks to Ben Pitts’ lap steel guitar (and bass) for setting the tone across the album as well. Closer “Ghosts On The Periphery” is rife with cold attitude, howling winds heard beneath the labored guitar in the intro which leads to splashy blasts of drums from Andy Thomas. The whole track is a clinic of quickened sludge metal that packs an eerie finality to the LP and makes the loop back to “Don’t Look In The Mirror” well-earned.
A Crack In Everything reveals the broken nature of it all, including ourselves. But it’s not all bad, is it? In The Company Of Serpents takes the name from a Leonard Cohen lyric from “Anthem” which goes ‘there is a crack, a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in‘. Always a band to cascade their sonic and thematic darkness with accents of light and hope, they make it more apparent than ever with this new LP, which is marred by personal demons and malaise, that there is no redemption, improvement, or better on the other side without the brokenness that lets in the light. So too must we recognize that everything broken has a chance to be fixed from within.
As you’ve heard (you did press play, right?), In The Company Of Serpents have delivered the soundtrack for a cruel summer with A Crack In Everything. Even if it flirts with destitution and overbearing weight of existence, it itself is a testament to perseverance with the band going through their own trials to come out from under the gnashing of life to give us this excellent album. There’s still time to preorder the album on Bandcamp, released independently which makes your support even more paramount. Follow them across the plains through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as well.
Band photo by Kate Rose
2 Comments