Soothsayer - Echoes of the Earth (2021)

Calling the first 2 songs of this debut album 'Fringe' and 'Outer Fringe' was certainly no mistake on the part of Soothsayer. Just as the Irish quintet’s career has slowly faded in since 2013 with sporadic EPs, a split, and a live album, 'Fringe' emerges gradually from the silence, echoing chants and the rattle of hand percussion reaching a peak before 'Outer Fringe' takes the ominous clean guitar and turns it into pained dark doom. After such a relaxed start, the intensity maintained for the 8 minutes of 'Outer Fringe' feels thoroughly oppressive, raining down frustration and bitterness with Liam Hughes’s raw yells and the sonic girth of the guitars. In a similar manner as labelmates Lurk and Jupiterian, as well as a denser, more focused version of Oxbow, Soothsayer tread a fine line between atmospheric and heavy in addition to appearing simultaneously natural and unearthly.

Echoes of the Earth ends up sounding a lot like the cover appears, that hazy, sulphurous feel switching between sunset reflections and apocalyptic end-of-days doom-knelling. Occasionally, peace can be found in the gentle tempos and fond clean sounds of 'Cities of Smoke', though it’s hard to relax with screams of “There’s a storm coming” rising above intensifying drumming, not to mention the distant windswept voices that drift behind the pleasant guitar jamming later on. Keeping ugliness in constant sight stems more from the sludge side of Soothsayer’s sound, while a brief burst of blastbeats that draws 'Cities of Smoke' towards its conclusion should warn listeners that this sludge doom combo does not persist with easy rhythms across the album. Despite plenty of mood being added by guitar feedback and effects, most of the 6 songs feature a lurch back into pure heavy riffing, which pays off most obviously during the crushing 'War of the Doves'.

Amidst all this back and forth between spacious atmosphere and the hard hit, some of the scale of Echoes of the Earth gets swallowed up. Where Soothsayer differ from the other previously mentioned sludge doom outfits is in their expression of ideas. Oxbow tend to push all their weirdness on the listener from the off, Lurk subtly creep up through shifting angles and textures to unnerve, Jupiterian awe and overpower until philosophical submission is inevitable; Soothsayer, on the other hand, do not follow a single line throughout their debut but instead buffet in waves, alternating between incensed rage and majestic revelation as if engulfed in the ebbing of a mighty sandstorm. When some of the chanting from 'Fringe' reappears at heavier moments on the tracks at the longer tail of the record, an almost heroic feel comes over the music, something accentuated by a few more rhythmic parts of 'True North' that almost reach out to touch the black metal standards hinted at in the title. As a 52 minute work, Echoes of the Earth probably should come across as expansive, yet what happens sometimes is that concentration comes and goes as the massive changes in intensity flow past through linear song structures.

For some, the uneven, unpredictable quality of the music here will make Soothsayer seem directionless and pretentious, though that’s overlooking the clear improvements in synthesis that the Irishmen have made since the early self-titled EP and At This Great Depth. Acceptance from the esoteric stoner/sludge/doom school of Yob and Elder seems likely, especially with the presence of figures like Eugene Robinson (Oxbow), Ralf Garcia (Wolf Counsel), Paul Catten (Murder One), and - somewhat surprisingly - Dave Ingram of Benediction featuring vocally on various tracks. For all the turbulence of experiencing Mother Earth’s moods combined with the sensation of looking down from space, Soothsayer’s Echoes of the Earth strongly carries its implied threat within both its pensiveness and turmoil.