I made the vow that I was going to spare myself, and you the reader, all of the eloquence and verbosity that music reviewers acquire though the aid of Thesaurus.com. No, I was not going to puff this review up because there is just no need to. I'm the Lord High Executioner here, so no editor-in-chief can impose some draconian word count minimum upon this bush league blog. I opted to reduce to the lowest common denominator and sum this entire record up using classically vulgar American brevity… THIS THING FUCKING RULES!
Spiral Shades is the virtual music project of Norwegian guitarist/bassist Flip Petersen and vocalist/lyricist Khushal R. Bhadra by way of Mumbai, India. These two made acquaintance via commenting on the same Youtube videos of their favorite Doom Metal songs/bands. From this random cyber-crossing of the Tigris and Euphrates came the idea to do this long-distance project. Evidently, Petersen records guitar and bass tracks over inconceivably programmed drums from Norway, to which Bhadra then records vocals over in India. If this sounds like a complicated, tedious process... that's because it is! Any one with even the slightest music-making experience will well imagine how difficult it must be to write music with this cut-and-paste method, let alone to make it sound natural like this record does.
Humbly touted as demo yet clocking in at just under an hour with a nine-song track list of solid material from front to back, Spiral Shades may be selling themselves short. In reality, this is a full-length sized exhibition of healthy traditional Doom-Metal Sabbath worship the likes of which have not been seen since Sleep’s Holy Mountain. In fact, there are moments in Hypnosis Sessions where you almost feel like you are listening to some lost Black Sabbath record that has never been disinterred and coming to discover that this lost Sabbath joint just happens to be the sickest thing they have ever done. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, than Ozzy and his old mates must be blushing like Anime school girls...
The album opener “Frustration” is a rocking foreshadowing of the dark delights that await within this instant classic. From the grimy wailing guitar intro, horseback over a strutting bluesy swing, to the folky instrumental “Fading Sunlight” as their final bow, there isn’t a single piece of deadwood that should be cut off of this Trad-Doom masterpiece. This “Demo” is rising action from start to finish, never reaching a plateau nor relenting from its retro occult-rock vibe. Flip Petersen is a riff-machine, churning them out one after another while Bhadra’s vocals eerily invoke a young Ozzy's howl. As for the drumming, one could never be able to guess that they were generated through a computer program, sounding every bit as organic as a nicely worn, sparkling Ludwig 4 piece from the sixties.
Quite frankly, this is an instant classic that needs to be pressed on vinyl and released through a label so that it can be officially canonized as such. Rise Above, Southern Lord and the likes are probably 'going to the mattresses' over this... imaginably. Or will this masterpiece fall to the wayside as one of ‘the greatest albums never heard’?
I shudder to think that this will be the case with Hypnosis Sessions. If you’ve heard this record, than it would be inconceivable to think that word-of-mouth won’t make Spiral Shades the next Stoner/Doom “It” band. Night, night, SLEEP. You had a good run as Stoner-Metal's mountain kings...
Check them out here!
