Band:	Guhts
Album:	Regeneration
Style:	Post-metal, Atmospheric sludge metal
Release date:	January 2024

01. White Noise
02. Til Death
03. The Mirror
04. Handless Maiden
05. Eyes Open
06. Generate
07. The Wounded Healer

Although they haven’t officially disbanded, the lack of any meaningful activity from Witchkiss since the first Guhts release suggests that this new project is a regeneration of sorts; if that’s the case, then Regeneration is a good way to kick things off for this musical phase.

Guhts isn’t entirely Witchkiss under another name; in addition to the absence of Witchkiss’s Tyler Irish, this new band sees vocalist Amber Gardner and guitarist/keyboardist Scott Prater joined by bassist Daniel Martinez and drummer Brian Clemens (along with Dan Shaneyfelt, who has now left the group), who both joined after the project’s first release, Blood Feather, in 2021. I compared Blood Feather to SubRosa, among other bands, when covering that EP for Clandestine Cuts at the time, but Guhts have got quite a distinctive sound going on here, one that can’t be pigeonholed into any one genre.

At the broadest level, one would probably categorize Regeneration as post-metal or sludge metal; it’s a lighter form of the latter, but it has some of that dirty heaviness to it (for example, check out the trudging tom-heavy opening to “Eyes Open”), and longer songs such as “White Noise” and “The Wounded Healer” incorporate post-metal dynamics. Still, there’s more going on here; the group list New York Noise acts such as The Velvets and Sonic Youth as influences in the album’s promo blurb, and alt rock in general has its influence on the record. Shoegaze can be detected in the hazy fuzz of songs such as “Til Death”, and regular appearances of light single-string guitar tremolos betray a post-rock influence.

In merging alt rock and sludge/post-, Regeneration veers towards Helms Alee territory, and there are some comparisons, although I find the former to be more accessibly engaging with their writing. Other names that come to mind include Obscure Sphinx, particularly during the brooding closer “The Wounded Healer”, but the name that perhaps feels most pertinent is Julie Christmas, due to similarities in her and Gardner’s vocal styles. Gardner never demonstrates the outright exuberance of Christmas, but with a range that spans some sickly sweet cleans, more forceful, almost nasally riot grrrl attitude, and harsher borderline screams, there’s quite a breadth of approaches on display here.

The middle style appears first, on the sludgy opener “White Noise”, but the song eventually mellows out as the post-metal vibes com to the fore, eventually leading to a nice conclusion featuring melodic singing against a backdrop of dark distortion, post-rock tremolo and twinkling piano. Keys and electronics play a substantial role in this record’s sound, most obviously on the melancholic piano-heavy “The Mirror” (the highlight of Blood Feather, and one of three tracks from the EP to be included here), which also has some subtle electronic beats in the middle, but also with the darker piano during the choruses of “Eyes Open”, plus a couple of other moments elsewhere.

The short songs on Regeneration play their part; the shortest, “Handless Maiden”, is a short sludgy alt rock/metal cut with some synth pulses early, and a nice intensification towards the end with sludgier riffing and dual male/female shouted vocals towards the end. However, it’s the longer songs that are arguably most noteworthy here. The one (other than “The Mirror”) that represents the greatest departure is the title track; for several minutes, it sticks to cleaner tones, bringing the alt rock/shoegaze influences to the fore, before gradually turning darker and getting heavier as it progresses, culminating in a nice powerful climax.

Possibly the standout cut, however, is “The Wounded Healer”. At 10 minutes in length, it traverses a journey from a slow, churning doomy beginning that perhaps most heavily calls back to the Witchkiss days, but after an intense brooding passage in the middle, it moves into a pleasant post-y lull reminiscent of Obscure Sphinx, featuring a really nice melodic vocal refrain contrasted with background screams that probably represent the most extreme vocals on the album.

I liked Blood Feather when it came out, and Regeneration builds upon it nicely. I don’t love the style, and the vocals do sometimes have a capacity to grate, but on the whole this is a perfectly respectable full-length debut for Guhts, one that pays off Gardner and Prater’s new musical direction quite nicely.