The Bay Area metal lifers who comprise Worm Ouroboros are individually responsible for some of the heaviest music in the underground, but together they take a subtler, slower approach. Equally akin to ’80s acts like This Mortal Coil or Cocteau Twins as their contemporaries on the Profound Lore imprint, Worm Ouroboros inhabit a ghostly, gothy atmosphere. Since debuting in 2007, they have competently inverted the traditional structure of doom metal and post-rock (unrelentingly heavy albums with ambient interludes), making music that glides patiently and quietly, exploding only when the tension can no longer be contained.
Like Come the Thaw, their excellent 2012 album and first with Agalloch/VHOL drummer Aesop Dekker, their follow-up What Graceless Dawn is only six tracks long, though it spans over an hour. Tellingly, it takes Worm Ouroboros 15 minutes into the album and halfway through the second track, “Broken Movements,” before they unleash the full force of their sound. Until then, it’s mostly whispered vocals over Jessica Way’s chilly guitars and Lorraine Rath’s slithering basslines, with Dekker’s artful drumming knocking eerily against the walls. When “Broken Movements” reaches its climax, they all converge into a thunderous roar. Rath and Way wrap their vocals around each other like a string section, soaring over Way’s crushing riffs; together their voices form the guiding light of the album. But while Worm Ouroboros have never sounded more powerful as a three-piece, these type of crescendos are not the focus. The most crushing peaks instead come from its softer moments, like the heartbreaking coda to “(Was It) The Cruelest Thing” or the haunting intro of “Ribbon of Shadow.”
Throughout the record, the trio maintains a consistent, earthy mood, occasionally playing off one another with the intuition of an improv group. It pushes Warm Ouroboros to new heights. Way’s guitar can reverberate with a lonely, Lost Highway howl and sparkle with a metallic shimmer, often lending the album its texture; Rath’s bass playing serves as its melodic foundation. Dekker, meanwhile, eschews his typical assault with a more dynamic palette. His slow patter in the midsection of “Suffering Tree” gives it the feeling of an apocalyptic Christmas carol, while his dramatic, double bass drum rolls in “(Was It) The Cruelest Thing” provide a late-album burst of adrenaline.
While each of the album’s songs take a similar route through their 10-minute runtimes, Worm Ouroboros layer their music with enough nuances to keep things from getting too dense. As indicated by their band name, which is derived from the title of a cultishly beloved 20th century sci-fi novel, Worm Ouroboros have a literary flair. It’s inherent to their deeply poetic lyrics (“Weighing our worth in sacks of black earth/Filling our hearts and our graves with their sum”) and by the whispered passages of William Blake that open and close the album. Blake’s poems also give the record its bookending track titles, “Day” and “Night,” suggesting that What Graceless Dawn thematically covers a 24-hour span. This might be true (particularly if the span of your day mostly involves staring awestruck at a blackening sky, contemplating mortality with a lingering sense of dread). But Worm Ouroboros’ power feels mysterious and eternal: In just an hour, they conjure up an entire lifetime of darkness.
