Band:	The Mountain King
Album:	WolloW
Style:	Drone doom metal
Release date:	February 22, 2022
A review by:	nikarg

01. I Bongnob
02. II In Girum Imus Noctem Aram Et Consumimur Igni
03. III Wollow
04. IV Sophos
05. V DNA Sand
06. sohpoS VI
07. wolloW III
08. ingI rumimusnoC tE marA metcoN sumI muriG nI II
09. bongnoB I

I slept on The Smell Of Stars And Vomit in 2021. It would be a crime to sleep on WolloW too.

The Mountain King is an unpredictable shapeshifter. The promo sheet of their new album says that “it’s been the band’s premise from the beginning to create a new experience with every release”. This statement couldn’t be more accurate for a band that mixes doom, ambient, avantgarde, post-rock, drone, shoegaze, electronica, and black metal in a spellbinding kind of way.

WolloW is about time’s relativity and how we perceive it. Half of the tracks on it run backwards and, if you ask me, it must take an enormous amount of skill to be able to craft songs that are equally entrancing when played in reverse. The songs bleed into one another but also stand out as individual entities. During the first half, I feel like I am listening to an experimental anthology of sounds taken from Warning, Tool, Burzum, and Portishead. And when the second half arrives, I find myself listening to these same sounds but this time I am in the Black Lodge of Twin Peaks or in the Upside Down of Stranger Things.

The Mountain King challenge, contort, and twist the doom metal genre and turn it into something far stranger than what it usually is. Some might find it high-minded and/or pretentious, but my experience with it is that it grabbed me from the very first encounter and it stuck with me long after I first listened to it. Unconventional it is for sure, and often alien-sounding, with the vocals coming across as unsettling as possible. It’s like Patrick Walker and Maynard James Keenan blending their voices together and trying to be heard through thick and disorienting haze. The music feels like a collection of disturbing fragments of the mind and warped memories of reality. Repeated listens unveil a purpose and meaning behind all the eerie, haunting, and mind-bending routes that the album travels through.

The most fascinating effect WolloW has on the listener is how it seems to affect the perception of time. We often say about an album that it feels hypnotic but this one is more than that; it takes hold of the mind and places you in a sensory deprivation bubble where the only thing that echoes is its dark and uncanny music. When it is over, you don’t know if it has been 40 minutes or 4 hours since it started playing. Especially with headphones, this album is a thoroughly captivating and absorbing listen. I don’t know how The Mountain King have made something that can be at the same time warm and comforting, and also distant and dissociative, but they have.

WolloW is unique and bewildering, and will make you forget about time.

“New moon saw teeth seas
Emit time.
See, as if it was a new moon.”