Thou - The House Primordial / Inconsolable / Rhea Sylvia / Magus

2018 has certainly been a big year for Thou and I am so upset that it has taken me this long to tackle this piece here. Ordinarily I would have done all four of these releases separately, but I think the interconnectedness among them fortunately plays into a convenient justification for one long bad boy of a post. WOO! Let’s do it. With a total of nearly three hours of music across the series of releases, Thou have made one of the largest contributions to metal, though still not as large as Therion’s Beloved Antichrist… unfortunately. But rather than simply pouring the extract of one session into four cups without trimming the fat and presenting them as an exhibition of ambition, Thou clearly approach each project with a different artistic intention and in doing so they prolific output has paid off as an interesting look at the band’s artistic facets from different angles. So, I will be discussing each of the three EPs, and then Magus, individually.

The House Primordial

The first EP Thou released in this series of projects, The House Primordial, is also the longest of the EPs. A mostly noisy and dark ambient affair, the EP traverses a series of five pairs of tracks, the first being mostly ambient instrumentals, and the second being a more harshly delivered mantra of sludge and black metal at doom metal speed. The songs’ short, dejected lyrics are shrieked in lo-fi black metal fashion and lend to the spacious atmosphere the songs construct across the record. Being that it is still an EP just under 38 minutes in length, the songs are rather short, but to their own benefit, as Thou don’t linger too long on one idea, staying just long enough to fill the void they need to.

“Wisdom in the Open Air” opens this first EP in a haze of howling winds, amplifier feedback, and growing bass distortion, leading right into the sardonic dirge of slow, subtle doom of the song “Premonition”, made all the more visceral by way of grainy, DSBM-style vocals. The first two songs set a stellar mood for the record and lead nicely into the next pair of songs: the solely ambient number, “The Sword Without a Hilt”, and its sludgy atmospheric black metal counterpart, “Diaphanous Shift”. Both tracks serve their purposes well on their own and make for another fine pair of juxtaposing parts the album.

The ambient transition piece, “Corruption and Mortal Trauma”, opens the doors for the sludgy doom metal piece, “Psychic Dominance”, which once again injects an aura of mental torment with muffled black metal screams. Another noisy drone of distortion in the form of the track “Prideful Dementia and Impulsive Mayhem” leads into the noisy sludge of “Occulting Light”, whose percussion reminds me a bit of that used by The Body (particularly on my favorite album of theirs: I Shall Die Here), and whose exorcism of demons fades into a haunting ambient interlude (the song “Birthright”) of echoed vocals from its own drone metal ending.

The song “Malignant Horror” closes the EP with a menacing dirge of depressively blackened doom that brings the waves of sound the album has been building crashing to shore as it slowly picks up speed only to drop back down to its torturously slow pace, and its drone of sludge that winds the song off concludes the album fittingly.

Upon hearing that Thou was going to make a ton of new music to preface another ton of new music, I was honestly expecting a kind of boring slew of unimaginative warm-up music to mainly tease the release of Magus, but I was actually really impressed with The House Primordial particularly. I liked the interesting flow of tracks across the entire album, and I liked the way the songs not only paired well with their counterparts, but also the surrounding tracks. It’s a solid and well-portioned EP that stands well on its own with its successful execution of an interesting musical concept.

Inconsolable

Released just a few days after The House Primordial, Inconsolable takes a sharply melancholic and certainly unexpected turn. Not that Thou has ever really let the sludge metal label that follows them keep them from odd projects or unconventional collaborations, but even so, the soothing pensiveness that spans Inconsolable comes in a seemingly unlikely format. A mostly ambient album driven by clean and acoustic guitars and basses (even dripping in some grunge influence) and haunting female vocal features, Inconsolable is a strange but gorgeous thing for Thou, and one that shows them as masterful multi-genre musicians.

The somber meditation of the acoustic guitars and smooth clean vocals of “The Unspeakable Oath” opening up the second EP harken back to Jar of Flies orSap-esque Alice in Chains and it only gets better from there, with the beautifully bleak second track “Come Home You Are Missed” working in vocals either pitch-shifted or from one of the EP’s female contributors (either are feasible and it’s hard to eliminate either possibility) and a deeply rumbling bass. The ethereal beauty elevates again as the third track, “The Hammer” brings in a crooning harmony and enrapturing strings that heighten the meditative moodiness of the album. The next song, “Behind the Mask, Another Mask”, takes a turn for the minimal and features a very Chelsea Wolfe-like vocal performance over a barely effected guitar. My only wish is that it was perhaps drawn out a bit more, but perhaps the album also needed a shorted piece at this moment.

The song “Fallow State” fortunately expands on the gothic folk approach of the previous song. The next song, “Into the Scourge Pit”, is a decent addition, but aside from its acoustic bass strumming, it doesn’t bring much new to the EP, though I do like the acoustic guitar work paired with the strings over the somber vocal mantra near the end. “Find the Cost of Freedom” is a neat, mostly instrumental piece with interplay between acoustic bass and guitar before giving way to an A Capella choir’s melancholic delivery of the album’s short, conclusive poem. The closing instrumental track, “Entombed in Man”, ends the album on a soothing note of clean guitar strumming just before a rise of amplifier feedback is cut off, foreshadowing a return to loudness in the next installment.

Inconsolable provides a fascinating look into a whole new creative facet of Thou, and one that suggests quite the level of comfort within the ambient, atmospheric, and sometimes even softly grungy styles embodied on this EP. Again, the band probably did the right thing in keeping it relatively short and complete mostly with highlights to not overstay its welcome (though I’ve heard numerous LPs of similar length that still sound like they drag on and on). I don’t know how much Thou plans to incorporate these kinds of sounds into their future releases, if at all, but it would be fascinating at the very least to hear this mixed with their signature sludge or the kind of harrowing blackened doom from The House Primordial. Hell, I wouldn’t be at all opposed to a full-length of this stuff.

Rhea Sylvia

The band’s third EP is also the shortest of the four releases, but it compounds Thou’s powers into a grunge-worshipping display of awe and an ambient black sludge fest that turns back toward Thou’s usual sound. At just over thirty minutes, Rhea Sylvia finds Thou working more moody guitar sections into their usual wall of distorted sound and playing a bit with the transitions between the two, while also incorporating some novel ideas, but not nearly as much as the previous two releases.

The album enters with the ominous clean vocals and dissonant, droning noise of “The Only Law”, which breaks into a haze of melancholic distortion and somber clean vocals that traverse a terrain of meditative sonder though stellar musicianship. The clean intro of “Unfortunate Times” leads into a funeral dirge of sorrowfully harmonized guitar distortion and harsh black metal vocals, which builds slowly until being overtaken by reverberated guitar echoes in probably the most classically Thou manner on the whole EP. The next track, “Non-Entity” works its way from an ambient black metal intro to Thou’s signature sludge in a relatively short time frame.

“Deepest Sun” shows the boldest display of Layne Staley tribute with Matthew Thudium’s harmonies in the first half harkening directly to Alice in Chains’ slower moments like “Rooster”. Its eventual and beautiful culmination in sludgy black metal makes it probably the strongest piece on the album. The doomy and grungy “Restless River” returns to Thou at their usual, but also quickly finds them ascending through the post-metal ether into higher emotional plains. It’s moments like these on the album that keep it exciting and from being just another Thou project.The band finish with a solid cover of Crowbar’s “A Lasting Dose” in familiar Thou fashion, honestly not too remarkable, but it’s not a bad cover, nor is it a disastrous conclusion to the album.

Though it’s the most comprehensive of the three, I’d say Rhea Sylvia is probably the least exciting of the three EPs, just because I think there is a good amount of time in which Thou drowns out the unique approach they take with the grunge and post-metal elements with their usual thick, monolithic doom metal, limiting the album’s ability to really shine as a special addition to their discography. It’s a strong addition, but it still feels as though Thou forced these new ideas to largely assimilate into their established sound. Nevertheless, there are still a good few highlights to point to and the band do still bring enough to the table to make it a unique part of their collected works, just not as unique, me speculating, as it could have been.

Magus

Well it has all lead up to this, Magus, Thou’s first LP since 2014’s acclaimed Heathen, the chance for Thou to expand upon, and even top their magnum opus. With the strength presented on the foreplay EPs, they certainly looked poised to do so. Yet, rather than revolutionizing their sound with the integration of what they performed on the three EPs leading up to Magus, Thou opt to keep their signature sound relatively unadultered. While I wish they had shot for something as grand and ambitious by their standards as the three EPs had suggested of Magus, I’m also glad they focused on honing their sound instead of trying to shoehorn things into that sound that may have been best kept separate.

The album begins with the classically lengthy “Inward”, which finds Thou right back in their comfort zone doomy blackened sludge, and it is a winding plummet of cavernous distortion in top-notch form for the band. The down-tuned guitars and thunderous bass provide a hefty foundation for the ever-descending dirge. The short, odd black metal guitar-laden interlude “My Brother Caliban” leads seamlessly into the next sprawling slice of Thou’s typical sonic bread, “Transcending Dualities”, which begins as a sorrowful march through beautiful a doom soundscape, but transitions into a more repugnant and vengeful finish. It’s a bit par of the course for Thou, but still nothing horrible.

The following, relatively shorter track, “The Changeling Prince”, does well to up the aggression of the distortion and the interplay between the pounding drums and the crunchy, down-tuned guitar riffs, as well as making more dramatic transitions between its darker and brighter moments. A repeated lyrical mantra from this song introduces the next ten-minute epic, “Sovereign Self”, which adds a bit more ambient black metal to the mix, but only to make the song all the more sinister, and the trajectory it follows is a thrilling climb to enrapturing malice. The song leads directly into the choral interlude, “Divine Will”, backed by a mid-tempo tom pattern.

“The Kingdom of Meaning” resumes the doomy black metal advance, but despite its more shoegaze-y finish, it feels a bit to standard for Thou at this point and essentially just sucks up time on the album. While an album with songs like this are certainly meant to provide a lengthy, atmosphere for thought and serve as a more of a guiding vessel for that thought, even a . The novelty is certainly revived in the bass-y and plink-y instrumental intro and the delicious pedal-supplemented groove of the six-minute piece, “Greater Invocation of Disgust”.

The sardonic screams of “Elimination Rhetoric” fit firmly with the aggressive message against misguided and willful ignorance and the low grooves the song reaches down towards. The song also features one of the more emotive doom solos on the album, which it benefits it greatly, as well as an unwritten section of lyrics that seem to repeat “I can’t help myself I’m darkening” or something phonetically similar (I have been notorious for mishearing lyrics). The song leads into the last ambient, noisily distorted interlude, “The Law Which Compels”, before the album’s final piece.

Magus closes with the cathartic epic of Thou’s signature black/sludge/doom blend: “Supremacy”. The song is Thou at their usual craft, but it finds them at probably their most consistently consciously punishing. The song ends with the smashing blows of cymbals and low-register guitars beneath a growing cascade of droning noise, and it is a fantastically fitting note the on which to round the album, and the ambitious four-project series, off.

I’d put Magus roughly on par with Rhea Sylvia, fairly below the first two EPs in the series. Magus is a bit more Thou-as-usual than the lead-up albums were foreshadowing it to be. Nevertheless, Magus is probably the band’s densest batch of sludge to date, with thick, meaty basslines and muscular guitar lines produced well to retain their contractile strength at such low registers. I wish the band had brought a little bit more in the way of new ideas to Magus, but it’s definitely a slow-burning mood album by design, and far from a poor effort from the band.

This series of releases have provided some unexpected insight into the creative corners of the minds of Thou, and beyond mere novelty. In an odd turn of events, Thou’s best moments from this string of diverse releases are those that featured the boldest departure from their comfort zone, though ironically, they show themselves do be quite comfortable doing the unexpected away from their typical sound.

I think this massive release of sound is significant even beyond Thou, though. Rather than focus all their efforts onto a single, crowd-pleasing project, Thou sort of decided that they were going to have their cake and eat it too. Granted it took the monstrous release of multiple albums, but they accomplished it, and they actually put forth a consistently strong effort across all four projects. Even if focusing some of their energies away from the main course and onto these appetizers was hypothetically detrimental to Magus, I’m glad Thou opted to roll the album out this way, by displaying a fearlessness with adventuring into far-off musical lands and firmly bucking their own trend. I’m glad they did this because it provides a great example to other bands who are perhaps hesitant to stray from their established stylistic bubbles, proof that it is possible to not just venture, but also excel elsewhere. I hope other musical artists see this and find themselves inspired to expand their abilities into other realms without apprehension the way Thou have, because what Thou have contributed to with these albums to the diversity of metal is fantastic..