It’s Monday and Mondays suck, so let’s grind it out with 夢遊病者’s 5772.
This is like a fucking horror movie soundtrack. I just gotta throw that out there now, this is some bizarre, ghostly, experimental, psychadellic, melodic—altogether insane grind/death/black/thrash/noise-rock…I don’t even know, it’s something else. Something way out there. Hell, it doesn’t even really fully fit in with this column. But it’s got enough elements that I gotta shoe it in. Besides, if you don’t know about this band already, now’s the time.
夢遊病者, or Sleepwalkers, hails out of Osaka, Japan, Tver, Russia and New York. I don’t know where exactly in NY, and it doesn’t really matter. I had originally heard of these guys back in December 2016, when it was way too late to get them on an end of the year list. Who’s in the band? Anyone known? I don’t know. It’s anonymous project so far as I can tell, with the trio only identifying themselves with initials.
5772 opens with “Empty Urns”, a doomy, black metal addled track that has its grindier moments and an almost immediate psych undertone. The beast is heavy to get going, like a locomotive bursting through a haze of marijuana smoke. Hell, there’s even keyboards at one point that sound like a locomotive horn. The vocals are buried, jumbled in the distance. Sometimes screamed, sometimes spoken, sometimes whispering. The bass is fuzzy, and sometimes it sounds like it’s being played with a slide. The guitar is always off the wall. Pinch harmonics, sometimes bringing the wail of melancholy, sometimes just screeching, sometimes heavy.
Once the second track “White Linen” kicks on, you notice the band has no need for consistency between tracks. Usually, that’ll kill an album. But no, not here. 夢遊病者 has no interest in following expectations and the first tracks should have hinted at that enough to prepare you for this. “White Linen” follows a more melodic structure. It’s slower, doomier, heavier, almost reminisce of something Boris would do. The vocals sound like they’re being exhaled as the guitar lead stacks and stacks.
“So where does the grind come in?” you might ask. “We’re already two tracks in (over seven-minutes) and so far this album sounds like anything but grind.” It’s not, like I already mentioned. It’s not a grind album. And this is the internet so I do feel the need to reiterate this point. However, to think that 夢遊病者 wouldn’t churn out some blast beats would be to sell them short. The band has some incredibly aggressive moments. The aforementioned “White Linen” features a bit that really gets the drums blasting and then angelically falls back into the sad, slow guitar lead that has been stringing the song along.
The real, savage kicker is the final track. “Only Stones” has an ax to grind, and grind it it does. It’s one of the best meldings of black metal and grindcore you’re going to come across. The drums are pissed off, fast and chaotic. The guitar and bass go between tremolo picking and straight blasting. And, despite its shorter run time, still manages to squeeze in some psych.
Were this a full review, I’d go through every aspect of this album, but it’s a feature. And frankly, I don’t wanna spoil all of 5772 by breaking it all down and picking apart every song. This is an album that deserves to be explored without too much being revealed about each track. But I will say this much before closing: yes, “No Flowers” is insane. Just not in the way that one might expect. Sit down with it, dim the lights, put on some headphones and let the album obliterate you. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to come out of a seance at an abandoned insane asylum after ten hits of LSD.
夢遊病者’s Bandcamp
