Well, here's a sensation I don't get to experience much: Hearing a new metal album and wishing the songs were longer. Winter Hours, the second album from Brooklyn doom power-trio Tombs, arguably peaks with "Merrimack", an epically lacerating blast of animosity that abruptly ends before it hits the four-minute mark. It opens with a really pretty, scratchy, warm guitar haze, but it doesn't stay there long. Pretty soon, everything flares up into a thundering groove, which pounds and pounds and pounds and then just stops. "Merrimack" could be three times as long as it is and nobody would blink. And even though it's become a massive cliché in underground metal to run a track like this into the ground, I can't help but wish Tombs would've spent a little more time digging in and zoning out on something like this. But no: four minutes, and then it's off to the next all-climax roar.
Right now, a pretty huge chunk of the American metal underground labors under the twin shadows of Neurosis and Isis, two bands that slowly build these monoliths of ire, songs that start out soft and pile on effects until they become blurry, gale-force maelstroms of fuzzed-out guitar and floor-tom thud. There's even a name for it: the Neur-Isis sound, logically enough. Even when this stuff is great (like when Neurosis does it), it can't help but smack of formula. Tombs take that formula and do something interesting with it: They start with the blistering climax, and they stay there. No windswept atmospheric intros, no drawn out outros. It's full-blast all the time. Only a couple of songs on Winter Hours soldier on past the five-minute mark, and most burn out way before. And only a couple of quick sculpted-feedback interludes give us a chance to catch our breaths.
In a way, that's sort of a brilliant approach. And it sure helps that Tombs are at home within their own sound. The grooves feel totally intuitive, even when they lurch into pseudo-black metal so-fast-they're-slow blurs. Frontman and Boston hardcore veteran Mike Hill has a great vein-bulging bellow that only really loses its impact when he stops shouting and tries to sing, which he rarely does. And he spends as much time doing these sort of vaseline-smeared Dick Dale hummingbird/bumblebee chattering guitar noises as he does playing actual riffs, knowing exactly when to snap from one to the other.
But the locked-in thunder of Winter Hours can get a bit exhausting. Staying in constant bombast mode keeps Tombs from letting much dynamic range creep into their attack, and they barely offer anything in the way of melody or structure. If you're in the right mood for that sort of cathartic, omnidirectional animosity, it's great. They have that sound down absolutely cold, and they never sound anything less than demonic. But I can't help but think that these tracks would hit so much harder if they came attached to actual songs, if Tombs developed their sound beyond the narrow but suffocating crunch they offer here. Theirs is a sound you can get totally lost in, when they let you.
