Abstracter

San Francisco's Bay Area has inspired some of the most creative metal bands, and Abstracter are cut from this same cloth. Their three-song debut, Tomb of Feathers, covers the usual concepts of depression and alienation of the weak, but the build-and-collapse musicianship is on par with the finest Neurosis-styled doom to date. The epic-length cuts undergo several tonal changes during their respective lengths, as the quartet experience a definitive decline into depravity. Paralleling the downtrodden trajectory of Beneath Oblivion's 2011 opus, From Man to Dust, "Walls That Breathe" begins with Mattia Alagna's clean vocals, though he switches to harsh growls as the song starts to peak halfway through. For "To Vomit Crows," guitarist Robin Kahn picks the intro riff of Sabbath's "Children of the Grave" to introduce the relentless, Cable-like scraping therein. At eight minutes, bassist Jose Picou and drummer Ben James institute tribal, almost ritualistic rhythms reminiscent of Tool. What if -16- became a long-form jam band? "Ash" answers that question, as Alagna's voice echoes beautifully alongside Kahn's atmospheric soloing, though the first four minutes follow the smothering doom path blazed by Yob on their last two full-lengths. At the ten-minute mark, the song transitions like Mindrot to a slower, mournful tempo and revisits Alagna's clean vocals, laden with hope for these dark times. Self-funded, recorded onto '80s-era analog tape and mastered by James Plotkin (Old, Khanate, Khlyst), Tomb of Feathers reveals the exceptional vibrancy of Abstracter's DIY doom.