Review: Snowblood “The Human Tragedy” CD

Be not misled by the fact that this Scottish band's EP is housed in a less than attractive digipack (more on that later), because what awaits is something far, far more interesting and powerful than what the visual presentation would lead you to believe. After a three-minute ambient noise intro, "Kali" (the shortest track herein) builds into some plodding rhythms with quick bursts of frantic screaming and grinding dissonant runs that are but a mere hint of what's to come. All of the other songs top six to nine minutes, making for a rather lengthy excursion that's full of shifts between explosive, bashing sludge and sinister clean passages. Look for caustic guitar textures, doomy chord progressions, cackled screams and insanely deep growls, classic stoner rock runs, pulsing melodic basslines, and even a few breaks of droning singing. "Augustine" opens with a soft clean passage and quiet singing that makes for one of the calmest and most straightforward (i.e. fluid and uninterrupted) passages on the disc, gradually increasing in volume and not hitting distortion until very late in the piece. Its streamlined framework definitely hits like a ton of bricks though, unloading out of nowhere and definitely marking some of the finest moments of the EP. The nine-minute "Cape Wrath" opens with some deep Godflesh-esque harmonics that stack together into a more structured riff that repetitiously flows for several minutes (quite hypnotic actually) before dropping back to some droning clean vocals and sparse guitars. Closer "Escape is Not Freedom" has some of the more noisy and abstract guitar work herein as well, so each track sort of has its own little circle of individual influences stemming from the core style. I'm not faulting the recording at all, really. Could it be better? Sure, but they're in a solid position as it is. The guitars are thick as hell, the bass pulses away and makes itself more prominent during the calmer moments, the percussion sounds quite good to me, and the vocals are perfectly suitable. Minor adjustments could be made to the mix, and a few tones could use some polishing, but there's nothing actively holding them back in that department. As mentioned at the start I'm torn on the packaging here. The black digipack has a cool satin finish, but the outer layout totally blows, it's just too plain and boring. Inside is a booklet with some Asian looking artwork and some really nice, bleak landscape images, along with the lyrics, which looks better, but still too rough to really be effective. The lyrics are rather curious at times, however, "Escape is not freedom: Lower your eyes stargazer, We give birth and we take death, And when we're born, we're not born into the world, we're born out of it, And when we die, we don't die out of the world, we die into it, The great chain of being continues..." And here's where I get nerdy and rant about presentation, because everything about this EP is fucking great except for the fact that for all intents and purposes the layout totally blows ass. This thing's been sitting in a stack on my floor for weeks and I didn't listen to it because it looked like crap, and if it looks like crap chances are it sounds that way too. This CD is a rare exception to that rule, so it's essential that these guys take care of that. Seriously. I'm not being a dick, I'm trying to be supportive. Throw this fucker into a slick looking Hydra Head styled layout and I guarantee you the response would be massively different across the board. Good music demands good artwork, it's as simple as that. So, ignore how it looks and give this band a shot, because I'm hoping this is only the beginning of the damage they could unleash. Keep an eye out... this is really quite good, and it should only get better.