Idle Stones

Something weirdly relaxed and peaceful about this, the second album from the Finnish doom band Garden of Worm. It has a slow and exceptionally loose feel, which probably reflects the members’ roots in prog rock bands and their apparent penchant for improvisation. While parallels could certainly be drawn with other, heavily blues-influenced down-tempo acts like Reverend Bizarre or Electric Wizard, Idle Stones is a far ‘lighter’ album than anything they would produce. The smoothly unhurried delivery, the gentle guitar tones and the invocatory clean vocals put it, in terms of atmosphere, closer to eerie occult prog-folk of acts like Black Widow.

Opener Fleeting are the Days of Man glides along, a laid back guitar hook and very sparse drumming with lots of splish-sploshing cymbal underpin the melodious vocal line; it could be a slowed-down version of a smooth retro band like Witchcraft, although the slimy, translucent tone of the lead guitar soloing that surfaces towards the climax gives it an edge. This gives way to Summer’s Isle; the title is a Wicker Man reference and it’s clear the band are (quite successfully) trying to replicate the film’s wonderful balance of pagan otherworldliness and intensely threatening undertones. Once again, the music has a loose, improvisatory feel, like a late night jam when things are winding down. I think this works perfectly here- the tightly-wound group precision can be saved for the next tech-death record. This continues with the somewhat meandering opening to Desertshore, but then twists expectations by creeping up into a cackling and macabre climax.

The last track (The Sleeper Including Being is more than Life) is twenty minutes long, and feels like the most ambitious/indulgent (you choose) crystallisation of the moods Garden of Worm are going for. Spectral female vocals join the male ones here, and the mood is wound down even further; it has a fuzzy, static sensibility to it, comparable to something off one of the more recent Earth albums; trance-like, unwilling to really go anywhere. This is the charm of it; a strange and oddly magical album.