New York metal heavyweights Tombs just released a new remix/cover record, X Oblivion, via Season of Mist. While not every band can get away with unveiling a record like this and still having their fans rejoice, Tombs are definitely an exception.
“Since there is only one original on the album, the song “X Oblivion,” the process was really getting rid of excess stuff, sitting down in front of a computer with a guitar, going through the riff development process, obsessing over different parts, going through practices, recording everything, and the lyrics are probably the part that took the most putting together,” explains vocalist and guitarist Mike Hill.
“The song title is actually taken from the HP Lovecraft prose poem with a slightly different spelling. Conceptually, it’s not like an adapted version of the poem. It’s sort of inspired by that; the poem has more to do with the nothingness after life, and the song has more to do with the tendency for the universe to go towards entropy and anti-life, not necessarily death—I’m just talking emptiness and nothing and how the void is just this all-encompassing thing that devours all matter and life and reaches out into reality.
With this modest theme firmly in place, what follows, as you will see if you explore it, is much more than one original song and a bunch of covers. The idea for the record, Hill claims, evolved over time. Initially, the plan was to do a song and a video, but then they decided to push things further and stay creative during their downtime, and X Oblivion is the result. It also takes some experimental turns that listeners may not expect from Tombs.
“The G.G. Allen cover to me makes sense because I feel like in this day and age, everyone is being very sensitive about stuff,” says Hill. “I think that a guy like G.G. Allen really pushed the envelope, for better or for worse. Obviously, there are things I don’t agree with that he stood for, but the thing that I really admire about him is his commitment to be himself and creatively express himself freely. I’ve always admired that, and I wanted to bring that energy back into the world where everyone is looking for reasons to be upset and trying to seek out things about people to bring to the surface, to remind people that maybe there’s a little more to life than just trying to find fault in others.”
Watch the video for “Ex Oblivion” here:
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Photo courtesy of Scott Kinkade
