The past of New York’s Tombs feels, in retrospect, like a working laboratory for the success of Savage Gold, their third album and one of the year’s absolute heavy metal masterstrokes. For the first five years of their existence, Tombs felt undecided, a college kid cycling through survey courses while searching for a major. On a series of EPs, splits and albums, frontman Mike Hill moved through a half-dozen members (he’s now the only extant original) and twice as many modes, dispatching ideas in search of an identity. Their very good 2011 LP, Path of Totality, worked through turgid sludge and distant post-punk, seething black metal and prismatic psychedelia, forcing those forms into inchoate but intriguing shapes.
But Savage Gold betrays no such indecision, from the production choices to the stunning execution. Working with American death metal demigod Erik Rutan in his St. Petersburg, Fla., recording studio, Tombs mostly mustered the heaviest elements of its sound—breakneck blast beats and high-stacked guitars, irascible screams and punishing repetition—for a cohesive, propulsive, and definitive statement. Tombs made the decision to keep it relatively simple on Savage Gold, and that mandate has reanimated the band for 57 extreme and urgent minutes.
Tombs begins these 10 tracks with an ominous groan of organ creaks and doom guitar sweeps, but the lull is short-lived: Drummer Andrew Hernandez II slaps his kit twice and then steps on the double-bass pedal, commencing a blast beat that swells and shrinks but doesn’t actually stop for the song’s first two minutes. Across Savage Gold, Hernandez emerges as the hero, not only guiding the band through its twists between riffs and breaks between verses but also constantly redoubling each song’s intensity. He often sets a pace and then, at just the perfect moment, fills the space between the beats, acts of sudden escalation that push Savage Gold from a series of plateaus into a succession of peaks. “Ashes” nods to Darkthrone, particularly in Hill’s scabrous Nocturno Culto vocal homage.
But it’s Hernandez who does the heavy lifting, switching—seamlessly, repeatedly—between breathless blitzes, stuttering turnarounds and driving, four-on-the-floor wallop. Hill, guitarist Garrett Bussanick and bassist Ben Brand often split the leads and the distorted textures and counters that surround them. They pass the riffs around and decorate them in a way that emphasizes the momentum more than the melody itself. By shifting so much of the movement to Hernandez’s drums, Savage Gold is locked in motion that’s more felt than heard, more intuited than observed. The decision makes the eight-minute "Echoes" seem much shorter; the whole record becomes an unending rush.
Savage Gold has breaks in the armor, of course, moments where the drumming thunder and the piercing guitars acquiesce to less identifiable, less forceful sounds. The tripwire riffs of “Echoes”, for instance, decay into a slow cycle of feedback, while, just before the end, “Portraits” pulls back on its headlong rush to reveal a gale of bristling tones beneath the beating. But those passing moments—and even the cold, five-minute stare of the album’s only reserved track, “Severed Lives”—serve mostly as setups for a takedown, spreading a calm canvas for the band to soon rip through it.
Just when the electric whorl of guitars at the close of “Portraits” starts to feel almost safe, Hernandez leads the attack of “Seance”, his drums puncturing the reverie as the guitars coil around another militant meter. “Severed Lives” is a menacing drift of hissed vocals and slowly loping bass; after four minutes, it even sublimates into a bowed, sinister drone. It’s only a feint, a trap for the explosive finale of “Spiral,” the radiant and complicated closer that recapitulates the enthusiasm and magnetism of the entire album. Again and again, Tombs mitigate the rumble between a string of onslaughts, tempering one moment only to make the next more effective.
Tombs’ sense of timing, economy and impact throughout Savage Gold suggests the successes of Aesthethica, the second album by another similarly searching Brooklyn metal band, Liturgy. But Hill has no manifestos, no flashpoint politics, elements that would only distract from his band’s newfound decisiveness and direction. Still, Savage Gold’s energy suggests the same sort of “ecstasy” as Aesthethica, a feeling that also gives it concomitant crossover appeal. Maybe that’s a surprising suggestion, that the album where Tombs digs its heels into heavy metal and works with one of the genre’s bulwark producers might be the one that pushes its reputation farthest afield of metal itself. But you can feel their newfound focus and commitment here, racing through every new crest Hernandez hits or each burly refrain Hill bellows. It seems like a valiant journey through what he calls “Shades of darkness/ Kingdoms of ashes”—triumphant and without trepidation.
