More than anything I’ve listened to in a long while, The Fall of Altrusia — the second self-released album from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, doom explorers Sleestak – demands to be taken as a whole. Although the Land of the Lost references of the double-guitar, bass and drums four-piece are easily enough traced, their music is actually far more complex, never quite delving completely into meandering psychedelia, but adding a darkened jam feel to at times surprisingly metallic doom. The Fall of Altrusia is broken into chapters in the tracklisting, and though there’s an element of indulgence in that and in the music likewise, it’s justified by the songs themselves. Sleestak blend genres, fuse wavy guitar sounds and noisy drones, contrast deep growls with Wovenhand-style musing, and most of all, craft a coherent musical narrative from these seemingly disparate and usually isolated elements. It might take a few listens to fully appreciate, but The Fall of Altrusia is propelled by an intense and self-aware creativity – that is, Sleestak know the genres they’re toying with and clearly didn’t just happen upon their sound, but though the material is dense at times, it’s also refreshingly individual.
As the appropriately-titled “Chapter 1 – In the Beginning” starts to lay out the narrative, and guitarist/vocalist/organist Matt Schmitz follows an ambient intro and heavy-riff-into-Opethian-pretty-part tradeoff to deliver the first lines of the album as “War, fear, evolution/Civilization, technology/Manipulation breeds anarchy,” I feel more like I’m listening to Fear Factory than anything that would fall under the doom heading, despite the somewhat languid pace. Drummer Marcus Bartell adds to the metallic atmosphere with pulsing double-kick bass drumming later in the song, betraying a bit of Godflesh-style extremity while bassist Dan Bell and guitarist Brian Gresser relish in thick tones soon to be relinquished again as the lighter pre-vocal movement returns to set up the apex and conclusion. “Chapter 1 – In the Beginning” is ably done, but what’s even more notable about it is how well it flows into “Chapter 2 – Exiled From the City.” I don’t know if Sleestak wrote The Fall of Altrusia as one long piece or as separate songs they then wove together, but the flow between cuts is one of the strongest facets of the album. “Chapter 2 – Exiled From the City” finds Schmitz employing some David Eugene Edwards-style clean vocals over organ and tense strumming guitars, and an extended semi-jam on which Bartell’s ride cymbal seems to cut through everything else in the mix.
That’s all the more a shame for the subtle charm Bell puts into his bassline, but what really stands out about the drumming on “Chapter 2 – Exiled From the City,” and on The Fall of Altrusia as a whole, is how processed the drums sound. It’s not so much what Bartell is playing as it is the production thereof. The snare sounds too uniform and mechanized, too bright and forward for the soft pull of the latter part of that track, so that it undoes the melodic work of Schmitz’s organ, which is doubly unfortunate for how it disrupts the aforementioned flow Sleestak have clearly worked so hard to establish across the seven tracks, and which for the most part is impeccably maintained, even as the plodding, thickly-riffed doom groove of “Chapter 3 – The Prophecy of the Great Sleep” takes hold. One of two prophecies Sleestak have in store for The Fall of Altrusia, this one finds Schmitz once again utilizing his growl over one of the record’s best riffs that marches along until 3:19 in, when the song changes to a more rocking progression that carries it into another slowdown finale, setting up “Chapter 4 – Regression within the Hive” and its more outwardly progressive feel.
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Immediate kudos to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, four-piece Sleestak. To honor the coming of 2012, the adventurous doomers have made a collection of unreleased jams available for a pay-what-you-want download at their Bandcamp page. Given the name Altrusian Moon and a gorgeous cover befitting the psychedelic mood of the material, it’s as much a joy to hear as it is to appreciate the band’s bravery in stepping outside their songwriting comfort zone — or maybe just giving as a deeper look within it. Either way, as I said, kudos.
$0 or be as generous as you wish. We dug deep into our rehearsal archives to give our fans a glimpse into our relaxed freeform jams, a very psychedelic improvised musical exploration of song ideas. Yes, there are mistakes, missed drum hits, wrong notes, etc. but the journey is there — a raw yet sublime document of our times playing together in the basement over the years. Also included is the live remix jam version of “The Fall of Altrusia” from 2009. You’ll hear some of our wider influences in this material and may appeal to fans of Bardo Pond, Hawkwind, USX, Red Sparowes, Dead Meadow, White Hills, and Yawning Man.
