Imbogodom make creep-out music, the kind they play when the guy with the knife's just out of frame, when the phone call is coming from inside the house. The fun to pronounce doom-drone duo of UK guitarist/tape manipulator Alexander Tucker and New Zealandic cohort Daniel Beban deal in the kind of creaky spookhouse disquiet that whistles and thumps like a dark cabin on a stormy night; bilgey, sylvan drones overlaid with the occasional maniac-behind-the-door moan. The Metallic Year does get mighty eerie, but it only ever verges on startling.
Imbogodom begun when Beban, himself a guitarist and tape artist, was working as an engineer at the BBC World Service. Using a host of cast-off equipment dug up at the BBC's Bush House, he and Tucker crafted what would become The Metallic Year. Though his recent solo work's tended towards acoustic fingerpicking, Tucker's worked with Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley on a number of projects, an influence that shines through the cloudy Metallic Year; Imbogodom's rough-hewn, murky drones and Tucker and Beban's baritone vocal clamor recalls Sunn O)))'s recent work with Mayhem growler Atilla Csihar. Imbogodom's music is more diffuse, more acoustic-based, less tectonically threatening than Sunn O)))'s, yet similarly dank and foreboding; even the sparser, more windchimey stuff like "Indosoap" has neck hairs at attention.
After a blustery opening, Tucker and Beban move into the chiming "Unseen Ticket", a haunting, echoey gothic somewhere in the neighborhood of Califone or Matmos. "By "Of the Cloth", with its tightening cyclone of strings and joyless bellowing, Metallic Year is down to unnerve. The record's second half continues in this fashion, alternating between spacious, suggestive mood pieces and the deeper, more physical drones, but the balance gradually shifts closer to the latter as the record goes on, evoking some looming dread that's finally ready to strike.
And Metallic Year could really be a thrill, were its compositions up to snuff with its thick atmosphere. These songs-- the results of a sort of collective improvisation that found the duo trading off between making the noises and messing with the tapes-- are, by design, fairly simplistic, clearly the work of two guys and a bunch of sooty reel-to-reels. And the tattered, collagist feel to these drones is alluring, certainly Imbogodom's greatest strength as a musical unit. But too often the pieces themselves seem content to buzz, groan, climax, and move on; one wishes, under all that rust and char, amidst these piles of frayed instruments, there were room for few more daring dynamic shifts. Things do get grislier near the end as the drones get growlier, but The Metallic Year has an odd reserve about it, and the climactic shit-he's-got-a-knife moment you find yourself waiting for never comes. So, while the tense trepidation of Metallic Year might move you to the edge of your seat, it's not quite bold enough to get you crawling under it.
