Band:	Veuve
Album:	Pole
Style:	Psychedelic rock, Stoner metal
Release date:	November 15, 2024
A review by:	musclassia

01. Land Of Denial
02. The Thaw
03. Quest For Fire
04. Inner Desert
05. The Sudden Light
06. Thrive On Empty Temples

Considering the genre’s desert origins, the frozen North may make for an unusual setting for a stoner metal album. Nevertheless, the music within Veuve’s Pole will feel intimately familiar to aficionados of the modern heavy psychedelic scene.

Pole represents the third full-length effort from the Italian power trio, and lyrically draws inspiration from works such as Fargo as it depicts a journey northwards involving ancient creatures imprisoned in ice. The band’s compositional approach has undergone a journey of its own since their last outing in 2019 (Fathom); further embracing of the virtues of extended jamming has caused the band’s average song length to skyrocket, and it’s a shift in methodology that broadly pays dividends on Pole.

Despite featuring one less track than its predecessor, Pole is 10 minutes longer than Fathom, as their existing desert rock stylings have been pushed further in a psychedelic rock direction. There are perhaps inevitable comparisons to be made with bands such as Elder and King Buffalo because of this, but the trio’s self-acknowledged influences from Canterbury prog and post-rock/metal can also be factored into the equation of Pole. While it’s not an album loaded with innovation, it does perhaps have enough about it to establish something of an identity of its own within the larger stoner metal scene.

Pole (perhaps intentionally, to ease returning listeners into it) opens with its two shortest and most direct songs. “Land Of Denial” is a slick mid-tempo fuzzy rocker, fluctuating on occasion with regard to the volume and depth of the guitar riffing, but broadly sticking to a stable rhythm and feel; the half-sung/half-shouted vocal style of bassist Riccardo Quattrin is a bit unrefined, but doesn’t overly detract from the music. His voice finds a more fitting home on following track “The Thaw”, a slightly lighter and more spacious-sounding song that enables him to soften his tone and deliver more melodic vocal lines. “The Thaw” is also more varied than “Land Of Denial”, mixing warm, hazy mid-tempo grooves with faster, jankier riffs, and also dialling up the psychedelia a notch for the first time with a warbling, effects-laden guitar solo in a sumptuous bridge section (featuring a synth cameo for good measure).

This solo is the point at which Pole starts to truly come alive for me, just in time for a back-to-back trio of 12-minute tracks. Each of them meanders between thick, fuzzy heaviness and various iterations on softer, cleaner instrumentation. The first of the three, “Quest For Fire”, is perhaps the most forceful of the trio when it comes to heaviness, and there’s a fun solo midway through that really takes my mind to early Elder. At the same time, however, there’s some evocative tenderness to the song’s cleaner tones, particularly when it comes to the prolonged solo section in the final few minutes, which at first sings sadly in relative isolation before escalating in emotional gravitas in response to the increasing heaviness of the instrumental accompaniment, climaxing with a mournful tremolo lead line.

That resonant beauty of those final few minutes is the type of inspirational moment that helps set Veuve somewhat apart from the stoner rock/metal pack, and the following two songs (which were initially conceived as a 25-minute leviathan before being split in two) offer some more standout moments. An early, punchy riff in “Inner Desert” briefly betrays those aforementioned post-rock/metal influences; the following few minutes continuously sustain the heaviness and distortion, but the lead guitar work within this stretch injects moments of compelling feel. In contrast, “The Sudden Light” mainly offers groove and swagger in its heavy parts, but before it brings the volume, the ambient serenity in its opening moments sets the stage nicely for a prolonged instrumental jam featuring some slick guitarwork.

While it’s not quite an outstanding effort in the genre (the vocals remain a relative weakness across the album, and the quality of the more evocative moments within their writing raise the question of whether the album may have benefited from including more of them), Pole is a rather enjoyable album, one that just about pays off the expanded runtime and nicely demonstrates Veuve’s range and ability.