A lot of what I like about bands like Primitive Man and this brand of extreme sludge is how heavy and punishing it sounds. A lot of it is in the texture and the production, how it feels like in the very instant. But also an important side of it is outside that very instant, how long it feels punishing for. In that regards, Primitive Man have been quite uneven. Already in their first year as a music releasing band, they released the 40 minutes Scorn and the 90 minutes P//M, and that's a gap in runtimes that has continued to define the band. Of course some of their releases come in a more ambient/noise form, which often feel like side-quests than proper main line Primitive Man releases, which is why it was 2017's Caustic that had its 80 minutes define the excessive sludge nature of the band, with further such releases, even EPs, mostly staying in the 30-40 minutes zone. Until now.
Observance feels like a slightly more meager long album at roughly 70 minutes, at least compared to Caustic, but it still feels like a far cry from the most recent batch of shorter Primitive Man releases. It's the kind of runtime expansion that you hope gives the band more time to fully explore one side of their sound but that you inevitably also wish got some of its fat trimmed. You've seen that same kind of long album criticism before and Observance is no exception. That aside, there is something about the sound of Observance that makes it more fit to be a long album.
For one, the likes of Immersion (review here) and Suffocating Hallucination (review here) were albums that also had a decent enough portion of them playing with the faster side of sludge. Even though the band has always favored the slow and the crushing, and all of their sludge releases contain at least a bit of both (this one too has its faster moments, that one moment in "Natural Law" feels so mosh-inviting), it was 2022's Insurmountable EP that feels like it pushed even further in the slow direction, with the doom component of the sound moving towards something akin to funeral doom, with some moments that feel downright drone-ish. Even with its runtime being closer to 40 minutes, there's a reason why that was considered an EP, because its sound would get fully developed here.
At this point I thought I would feel more of a saturation with this kind of heavy sludge doom, because this is technically not something I haven't already heard before, but there's a thickness to the sound, especially in the bass, that makes Observance feel gargantuan and punishing in a way that evades that feeling of saturation initially, only letting it set due to the long runtime. Most of the album's songs are over ten minutes, most others not far behind (the only short song being a noise interlude), which does make the album itself structurally more fit for this long-form songwriting, and there are bits of nuance that do set the songs themselves apart, like a very outright funeral-ish feel to "Devotional" or an almost ethereal gothic touch to "Transactional", and something malevolently hypnotic about the last part of "Natural Law".
It is a bit odd to have Ethan McCarthy describe this as the most positive of Primitive Man's albums, but considering how low and downtrodden the listening experience of a Primitive Man album usually is, there are surprising moments in Observance where a melodic ethereal touch does take the atmospheric focus into something that feels like a flicker of hope in a broken world.
