Band:	Lo!
Album:	The Gleaners
Style:	Post-metal, Sludge metal
Release date:	April 07, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Our Fouling Larder
02. Salting The Earth
03. Deafening Bleats Of Apathy
04. Rat King
05. The Gleaners
06. Pareidolia
07. Kleptoparasite
08. Cannibal Culture
09. Mannons Horn

Lo and behold! Fast post-metal!

Calling Lo! post-metal might be a bit of a stretch since they take the atmospheric sludge core of that sound and go all in on its heaviness and immediate impact, while also not letting their sound be the heaviest nor the fastest in that style. But there's certainly a very high intensity in their sound that seems to stem from sludge's punk leanings as well as post-metal's... well... metal side. Lo! have always toed the line between atmospheric sludge and post-hardcore, but it seems like on The Gleaners they're most keen on making pigeonholing their sound even harder. I mean, when you take the longest in-between-albums break you even took as a band, you have to follow that up with a return to the studio that lives up to it.

I first encountered the name Lo! ten years ago when they were the openers for a Cult Of Luna/The Ocean tour that came to the city I would go to college to, and missing that was, at that point, one of my biggest regrets. I have since managed to see the other two bands and then I'm having hazy memories of Lo! touring the city again with another band, something I'm frantically searching for info on, but they don't have the most search engine friendly name. Regardless, that specific name, and seeing just how enthusiastic and high-energy their vocalist was, made them leave a mark on me enough to compel me to want to cover them, and now after six years, I have that opportunity again.

I've already touched on the stylistic variety and ambiguity of The Gleaners, but they're the kind of band where it really matters at what point in the album or the song you're at in your listening to give your take on what to call their sound. The core sludge is punchy as hell through its very palpable hardcore leaning. The vocalist being part of two death metal bands on the side clearly seeps into his vocal performance here. Barely palpable, but there's slight traces of other metal genres like black metal or doom metal as well. And while all this together creates a very muscular basis for the sound, it's expansive and atmospheric in a way that doesn't always direct their sound into the more longform approach that post-metal usually takes. Two tracks aside, where the band does take that longform approach, most of the tracks here are less than four minutes and yet still feel expansive even in a more condensed form.

That probably explains why The Gleaners is such a compact album. 40 minutes of runtime is something other bands in the same style would call an EP. Hell, the album starts with a song under two minutes, and no, that's not an ambient intro. "Our Fouling Larder" and "The Gleaners" are pretty good indicators themselves of the range that Lo! have in both runtimes and dynamic songwriting. The album is not devoid of ambient interludes and slower tempos, but there's an intensity inherent in the album that is at its strongest in the punchy fast sections but never leaves even when the album is at its mellowest.

In a way, Lo! are the kind of band that impress more with the density of their sound rather than its size. Metaphorically. Despite not being a long album, The Gleaners is a huge album.