Gravetemple - Impassable Fears album review

The most feverishly terrifying sounds tend to be spawned in the hideous spaces between ritualistic drone-doom, death-industrial and dark ambient. For every cold-sweat-inducing masterwork there are a dozen turgid dirges, but you can rely on Stephen O’Malley and Attila Csihar. Bonded in Sunn O))) since 2004, they’re seasoned sonic transgressors, and this is Gravetemple’s first studio album since their 2007 debut, so there’s none of the creative diarrhoea afflicting others in this idiom. The two gripping, disorientating 10-minute tracks sound like drone strikes on a performance art space where a zombie learns jazz drums during a poetry recital by a man turning into a werewolf, but at 35 minutes the album’s brevity feels like a distraction; inconsequential instrumental Domino sounds like a fire in a smoke alarm factory, and the synths radiate newfound celestial beauty at the end of Eternal Endless Void, for about a minute, and then the album’s over. Gravetemple’s stated aim is to induce trance states, but Impassable Fears feels more like a teaser trailer than the full immersion.