Veterans of the tape-trading and micro-label cultures, Harlem septet No Neck Blues Band formed in the early 1990s and began releasing music in roughly 1995, but Clomeim counts as only their fourth proper studio album, following 2001's Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones But Names Will Never Hurt Me, 2003's Intonomancy, and 2005's Qvaris. All of the band's work is dominated by free-improv squiggle and spasmodic outbursts, but the troupe has managed to carve out unique sonic spaces on their studio works: Appalachian folk on Sticks and Stones, needling post-rock on Qvaris. Clomeim abandons those idle fascinations as the band touch on metal's sonic heft and under-surface collision.
To be clear*, Clomeim* doesn't sound at all like Black Sabbath, and it's fitting that its sonic similarities to metal is found only in groups-- Om, Earth, Isis-- who stripped any blues influence from their music. No surprise, certainly, but it's still worth noting NNCK's increased use of metal signifiers: prolonged, unintelligible growls, churning bass, saturated, speaker-eating distortions. These elements are folded into NNCK's eerie cawing guitars and brittle rock rhythms. "Ministry of Voices" opens with a discordant, fog-horn guitar chords and free-jazz horns; five minutes in, a deep, bruised scream escapes the mix, competing to the song's end with a comparatively straight-laced guitar lead. "Walking Wind" is a sickly raga, its clean-channel wanderings eventually replaced by a bullying rumble. "Salai Widnalas" layers uncomfortably treble-heavy guitar chords over a looped, descending bass riff, both of them leaving plenty of room for caged recitations.
Halfway through the album, the NNCK return to more familiar territory, trading menacing for strange: "Make Love"'s breathy whispers act as a strange, rhythmic blanket; "La Promesse Miruco" bubbles and blisters, its phased guitars circling funk; "Again" employs a silvery guitar that continuously hints at jazz phrasings.
No strangers to sprawl and churn, NNCK's treasure hunts don't always fascinate, however. "Ialas Saladiw" finds a weird pastoral-industrial purgatory that sounds like lukewarm Nurse With Wound. "WOAIHB" gropes at the upper reaches of an organ and doesn't find much besides whittled, piercing high-end. "Silurist", pieces of which bookend the album, sounds like an orchestra pit of drone artists finding pitch.
NNCK rarely produce discrete pieces of good or bad music, so it's no suprise that Clomeim's thorny bristle pricks in random intervals, leaving you time to admire its tangles. After close examinaton, Clomeim reveals itself as a burly, chatty record from an often-cloaked band; that NNCK can draw any discernible themes from its knotty bulges suggest that they're still worthy of careful admiration.
