So Boneworm’s tunes won’t flow like fresh water but they will weigh over and erode your soul like gruesome stormy weather, the abrasive heaviness of glaciers, lack of light, isolation and, if we add what the band mention as elements of their background, grim industrial suburbs. These are ingredients for depressive black metal. But Boneworm managed to mould these sources of inspiration with their musical background and passions into an original, hydrid style of doom-sludge metal. Their originality does not reside much into the style and the type of riffs, as Boneworm do recall Sabbathian and Melvins very much, to start with. A good part of their originality resides, for me at least, in the use they make of silence. There is basically no feedback, no wall of sound behind the painfully slow, blues-drenched notes emitted from the guitars or spitted or shouted out by bassist singer Dave (occasionally backed up by his mates). Riffs (guitar solos), slow-paced drumming and singing are dosed like droplets slowly falling from a drip-feed to a sick body. Each note, sound, shout will take their (slow) time to vibrate and somehow echo in the uneasy silence, which is not the scary silence of a house haunted by ghosts but the silence of loneliness and poverty.
The sound is treated in a way that sound is not “crystalline” and there are not many effects of echoing evoking, say, open spaces. No, this is barebone, minimalistic doom in an existential cage, and captured right from the cage, apparently with not much subsequent reworking. Boneworm want you to suffer with them, and in order to convey their pain they employed blues. Blues is adding tons of groove to Boneworm’s ballads, which turn to melancholic and desolate bluesy funeral doom ballads instead of suicidal depressive lithanies, even if the lyrics are devoid of hope. The singing style is hopelessly angry shouting more affine to hardcore and noise than to other metal genres.
But, in spite of the minimalistic structures and features of their ballads, Boneworm guys also experiment wth psychedelia by means of their own raw way of playing during their overly dilated times. Well, the band’s particular way of unfolding slow heaviness can surely induce some hypnotic, “psychedelic” effects. However I was distincly reminded of early Pink Floyd more by the vocal parts (e.g., in ballad Sickness) than by the occasionally reverbered guitar sounds. And I found this feature, too, quite curious and original. So, yes, we have another doom band from Portland, Oregon! And after listening to them and, yes, being surprised by them and duly crushed flat by their “trve” heaviness right from their debut album, one may realize that, yes, there are tons of bands playing doom but there is still space for approaching music with a different and original attitude in spite of being deeply rooted into “traditional” sources.
Doomsters! Don’t miss Boneworm’s debut via Bandcamp, in case you don’t have it yet, and, as usual, be generous with your donation in order to support the underground scene.
As stated by the Boneworm guys in their cool and instructive interview with Aleks (HERE), fostered by the success during their live exhibitions, they are writing stuff for a new album that, I’m sure, will bring you more lo-fi, blues-infused groovy yet hopeless, crushing pain and suffering!
Words: Marilena Moroni
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Boneworm | Bandcamp