Listening back to it now, I think what I enjoy most about Swedish atmospheric doomers Kongh‘s second album, Shadows of the Shapeless (review here) is the potential it shows. The album, released last year in Europe on Trust No One and given American issue via Seventh Rule Recordings at the beginning of April, isn’t an outrageous standout from the scores of post-metal that has come up in the last half-decade or so, but the trio of David Johansson (guitar/vocals), Oscar Ryden (bass) and Tomas Salonen (drums) are able to infuse the recording with individualistic glimpses of creativity to come, and on that level, it’s a very positive record.

That, however, is about the only level on which it is positive. Sonically, it oppresses, seems to hold you down at the shoulders. Even in its most atmospheric moments, it crushes with abandon and is the kind of heavy that brings to mind images of giant unmanned machinations in some factory building a Babel tower to rip open the heavens. Massive, in other words. Fucking massive.

After much delay on my part (most but not all of it completely my fault), I finally got my crap together enough to fire off some questions to Johansson for an email interview. Of course, what I wanted chiefly to ask him was, “Your album sounds big,” but that’s neither a question nor a basis for discovering anything about Kongh‘s processes, so I did my best to avoid it and only failed a little bit.

Following the jump, the guitarist/vocalist fields queries about writing, recording, Shadows of the Shapeless‘ suitably bleak artwork, how the band came to play the Kuma’s Fest in Chicago and subsequently got hooked up with Seventh Rule, and whether or not more US touring is in the cards. Please enjoy.

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Comp reviews — is there anything worse? In my experience I’ve found it’s basically impossible to write about a compilation as one would a normal release. Discussion of album flow is out, and with each artist only getting one track, there’s never really any chance to develop an atmosphere or mood before it’s changed by the next band. And even more so when it’s two discs. All you can ever do is list the bands involved and say, “Oh, this is good, this isn’t good.” So what the fuck?

Well, Falling Down II — put together and released in a 2CD digipak by the good people at France’s Falling Down ‘zine — have obviously donated a lot of time and a lot of love to put together this sequel to their first comp, and they’ve gathered an impressive roster of acts, and I guess if nothing else, we’re here in honor of that. Beginning disc one with Across Tundras and ending disc two with Mumakil, Falling Down II does somehow manage to keep an ear toward flow from one band to the next, as demonstrated in exemplary fashion when Kongh’s “Thunders Collide” bleed into Latvian ambient post-hardcore outfit Tesa’s “Untitled.”

Which disc you prefer is going to depend on the bands involved, so we should get the list out of the way:

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Why, it feels like less than a month ago, I was putting up a review of Swedish post-doomers Kongh‘s second album, Shadows of the Shapeless. Oh wait, that was less than a month ago. Well, in the time since, Kongh have hit the big time and premiered a track via our friends over at BrooklynVegan.com. The song is called “Voice of the Below,” and because BV‘s a little less tightassed with their hosting than some of their more corporatized fellow outlets, here it is, followed by some PR wire info:

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Appearing on the Swedes’ second album, Shadows of the Shapeless, “Voice of the Below” shows off the band’s intense brand of progressive doom metal. Kongh’s sound covers vast musical ground — from forward-charging sludge metal to icy doom to ambient rock — yet it is delivered seamlessly and with unstoppable momentum.

Shadows of the Shapeless sees its first official US release on March 30 via Seventh Rule Recordings. Shadows of the Shapeless was originally released in Europe by Trust No One Recordings (Isis, Khanate, Cult of Luna) in 2009.

Echoes of YOB’s The Unreal Never Lived pop up on Swedish trio Kongh’s sophomore full-length, whether it’s the driving rhythm that built tension “Quantum Mystic” transposed onto opener “Unholy Water” or the malevolent triplet riffing of “The Mental Tyrant” in the closing title track. By keeping their sound generally darker, though, and adding elements vocally and otherwise out of black metal, Kongh make it through the five tracks of Shadows of the Shapeless without sounding overly redundant or derivative.

Issued first in Europe by Trust No One, Shadows of the Shapeless finds distribution Stateside via Chicago imprint Seventh Rule Recordings. No strangers to the town, Kongh played the 2008 Kuma’s Doom Fest, which marked their first US appearance. Whether the narrative actually goes that that’s where and when they came to the attention of Seventh Rule (one imagines it was actually before), it’s impressive they’d wind up on the label nonetheless, Seventh Rule in the past having issued albums from Akimbo, Sweet Cobra, Indian and Wetnurse.

The music on Shadows of the Shapeless is bound to inspire all manner of antler-laden hyperbole and metaphor, but what it rounds out to is post-metal crunch with darker and heavier shades that set it apart from the pseudo-cerebral approach that so much of the genre has taken on these last few years. To call it progressive wouldn’t be a mistake, but guitarist/vocalist David Johansson successfully averts the Isis trap and crafts a more natural-feeling soundscape. As the press release suggests, the music is cinematic, but sitting and parsing through its ups and downs, blasts and lulls, feels like a waste of time as compared to experiencing the whole of each of these songs.

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