Band:	Meltem
Album:	Mare Nostrum
Style:	Psychedelic doom metal
Release date:	June 28, 2024
A review by:	musclassia

01. Tretze
02. Cúrcuna
03. Mandrágora
04. Oasi

Arising from Catalonia, Meltem draw upon Anatolian, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern musical influences in crafting their debut album, Mare Nostrum.

Initially formed in 2019, this band underwent several (publicly unrevealed) line-up changes before finalizing the three-person roster that introduced the project to the world, first with a demo in 2022 and subsequently a debut album that comes courtesy of Discos Macarras Records. Stylistically, Mare Nostrum features a relatively distinctive take on stoner-tinged doom, one shaped by psychedelic and World music influences. The four lengthy songs contained within very much take the listener on a journey, one intended by the band to traverse the waters of the Mediterranean.

The first of these journeys is the titanic 12-minute opener “Tretze”, which strides out the gate with a stomping fuzz-tinged doom riff that is soon accompanied by a scene-stealing tremolo-heavy guitar solo. While Mare Nostrum is relatively light on vocals, the mantric lower-register intonations of drummer Pep Carabante can be heard in what amounts to the verses of “Tretze”; these vocals fall into the category of ‘do the job, albeit with a bit of roughness around the edges”. The song as a whole does more than just ‘the job’, though; the tension is palpable in the guitar tone during the song’s early stages, but the track really grows after the halfway mark, moving through bass-driven percussive marches and eerie cleaner sequences, before eventually bringing back the fuzzy heaviness with renewed vigour and impact.

The other true colossus on Mare Nostrum, and arguably the pick of the bunch when it comes to the tracklist, is “Mandrágora”, a song that opens with heavy, ominous percussion that is used as a platform to unleash bruising riffs. Despite the intensity of the early vibe, “Mandrágora” ultimately reveals itself to be more expansive and dynamic than “Tretze”, allowing the band’s psychedelic influences to emerge during cleaner jam-like passages. There’s a fair few moments on this track, and the album as a whole in truth, that give me similar vibes to what Sunnata manage to craft. A band I was more surprised to find my mind drifting towards is Dordeduh; there’s something about the phrasing, delivery and melody of the vocals on this song in particular that feels similar to the clean singing on a fair few tracks from the Romanian band. The overlap of these vocals, the ominous guitar riffs and psychedelic soloing in the song’s latter minutes is, for me, the high point on the record.

The album’s other two songs combined don’t run as long as “Mandrágora”, but they both bring their own novelties to the table. One clear similarity between both “Cúrcuna” and “Oasi” is that each of them opens with percussion on the darbuka; closing song “Oasi” features further percussion of Middle Eastern origin with daf performed by guest musician Omar Kattan, and the percussion dominates this song throughout, providing a constant drive beneath the meandering clean guitar. It makes for quite an enchanting end to the record, really sounding like one is being carried by the desert winds. While “Cúrcuna” opens similarly, around the halfway mark it transitions towards a more typical psychedelic metal framework, Carabante switching from darbuka to the drumkit and the guitars turning increasingly distorted and riff-oriented.

Having these songs placing so much emphasis on the Middle Eastern musical influences makes for a nice contrast to the metallic focus of the two longer songs, and the combination of both having this range and writing within it to such an accomplished standard has led Meltem into making a debut album worth paying attention to.