Jagged Mouth
Louring
(Self-Release)
This is an unsettling collection of music.
At core, adjectives and comparisons aside, a few spins through Jagged Mouth’s debut album, Louring should be enough to elicit a deep sense of dread.
Let’s start where the Albuquerque band starts, on “A Wretched Offering” the gritty piece of doom metal that sets it off and dwells so profoundly on the low end that I question my choice in speakers; let me correct that, my neighbors question their choice in moving in next door. Jagged Mouth’s brand of cataclysmic rumble is horrifying.
The second track, “Fallen To Incarnadine Loam” simply cannot be described aside in the terms of visceral responses. I clutched my stomach. I rubbed the chill out of my flesh. I had to retrieve the dog from the corner of the yard where he cowered from me. Then I turned it down, the only relief from the song’s relentless collapse.
Matthew Tobias, who recorded the band, has done an amazing job of bringing new meaning to the term, “no holds barred.” Nothing on Louring, an anachronistic term for lowering, as in a sky, holds back. This is one of the heaviest albums I’ve ever heard and often the axis of which, that barely audible threat that holds it all together, seems on the constant verge of shatter. It’s the appeal, take “There Is No Help Coming” which rises to one of the album’s most enticing lead guitar lines before collapsing in on itself.
While Jagged Mouth has successfully crafted a doom metal album, there isn’t a lot of drift in the songwriting. I was constantly tempted by a psychedelic undercurrent, or the suggestion of prog-metal riffs but they never materialized. This left a few of the passages feeling dull, repetitive. If you’re looking for annihilation, you’ve found it. Anything further, you’ll have to somehow recover in time to seek it in the rubble.
