It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.
Those words, from At the Mountains of Madness, summed up the worldview woven throughout foundational horror icon H.P. Lovecraft's oeuvre, and as Tolkien relates to metal in terms of fantasy writers, so too does Lovecraft loom large in the pantheon of the genre's imagery.
When most people think of Lovecraft in metal, though, they likely envision either the more visceral bestiary of his earthly concerns or the pantheon of ancient gods that hover like a distant firmament beyond even our own mortal conceptions of mythology. Space doom progenitors Ufomammut, perhaps cut off from the immediacy of scene influences due to their residence in the mountainous Piedmont region of northwestern Italy, eschew anything so literal, their own brand of "cosmic horror" manifesting through ominous drone and Hawkwind-informed synth textures acting like background radiation against the emerging and re-emerging sludge riffs that break through the still vacuum of the universe.
Ecate, named after the Greek goddess Hecate if that gives you more of a handle on the pronunciation, gets back to the more earthy punch of the pre-Oro releases, with the more ambient droning passages acting more to set up tectonic blasts of fuzz doom guitar bursts than as end games in their own right. Ufomammut have never been a band that warms to singles or radio edits, but Ecate contains a pair of songs that venture as close to mixtape accessibility as you're ever likely to see: "Temple" is still a good seven-and-a-half minutes, but sticks with monolithic sludge riffs throughout with none of the context-setting drones which typically interleave any given Ufomammut track; "Plouton" is hands down the most crowd-friendly effort the band have put out in recent memory, barely over three minutes of ear-splitting sludge with easily discernible vocals, something that is rarely a given with this band.
Both of these tracks are preceded by "Chaosecret" and "Somnium", respectively, which set up and bookend the more raucous sludge moments with extended passages of spaced out drone-doom. With Earth doing their Western noir thing and Om pretty much AWOL in light of the ongoing Sleep reunion, Ufommamut is one of the few remaining metal bands out there still taking the drone ethos seriously. Even should the aforementioned groups later return to the blueprint they helped invent, they're likely to find a new usurper to their throne in the form of three Italians who have scrapped their way up through the public consciousness in the intervening years.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho88ZlrLQBk[/youtube]
