Band:	Slow
Album:	Ab​î​mes I
Style:	Atmospheric doom metal, Funeral doom metal
Release date:	December 08, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Implode
02. Barren
03. Abyss
04. Collapse

Naming your funeral doom project Slow is the exact opposite of false advertisement. You know the most important aspect of the music before you even press play. So let's dig into the other aspects too.

Actually, going back just a bit, naming your funeral band "Slow" is such a no brainer that it didn't happen just once, although that case was quickly resolved with the newer US band renaming themselves to Drown. The original Slow, the one that released this album, is another one of the billion projects of Olmo Lipani, also known as Déhà. Yes, the man of a million projects also releases a bunch of disparate albums as solo albums even if most of his projects are one-man bands. And somehow, despite the mind-boggling release schedule, most of them are pretty good. Slow started out as a one-man solo project too, but the last couple of records have received contributions in various forms from Lore Boeykens, who seems to have became a second member of the band.

Now funeral doom is a genre that is a bit hard to get right, mostly because the slow pace and the elongated runtimes can create a pretty big snoozefest if what you're making is not engaging. Plus there's only so many times you can make slow guitars with a keyboard topping and low gutturals and still be engaging, so most of the times you won't find a lot of surprised in a funeral doom album and it all relies on how effective the texturing and the production is in making the music engaging. A couple of Slow's albums like V - Oceans have aced a crushing and suffocating sound and the runtime, while not excessive, captured a sense of immensity. Abîmes I on the other hand, tackles things a bit differently.

The runtime is a much more concise, incredibly so by funeral doom standards, 43 minutes. Funeral doom's relationship with runtimes is a very interesting one, so hearing something that feels shorter on the long-term while the songs themselves still sit in the 8-15 minutes range means that in the instant it feels like the way funeral dooms should be while as a whole it doesn't let the saturation of so much doom set in. And the soundscapes themselves, even if all the building blocks are completely traditional for the genre, there is a really great sense of melody and atmosphere. It's really well done in the established canon, but the moments that really do it for me are the smaller melodies when the cloak of doom is taken off and the moments where the cloak is at its peak and a guitar solo comes out of nowhere.

Some of Abîmes I works best when you try taking the album in isolation to Slow's other albums or the larger funeral doom sphere, lest you wanna feel too much like you heard this before, but for what is done with these established building blocks, there's few albums as rewarding as this one.