0 [FROM THE CRATES #13] Swarm of the Lotus - The Sirens of Silence (2005)

Review by Matt Abramson

Swarm of the Lotus - The Sirens of Silence
(Abacus - 2005)

First things first. I will be playing a track from this album on my next Rockcast, which I believe will be online next Monday or the Monday after that. I'm not sure whose turn it is. You should be listening every week, though. If you aren't, I find it hard to believe you care at all about your personal well being. Just saying.

I buy CDs sight unheard more often than I care to admit. A few years ago, record labels got privy to the success of Mastodon and started putting stickers on their albums that said something like "For fans of Mastodon!" Being a gentleman of more than reasonable intelligence, I was and am immune to such obvious marketing ploys. Yeah, right. I fuckin' bought all of 'em. This was in the days where I didn't have great resources like SRG.com to act as a divining rod of ass-kickery. So I bought some total shit. Fortunately there were some real winners, too. Swarm of the Lotus was one of those.

I'm coming up short on my usual band biography-type stuff. Information from the usual array of online sources is pretty scant. The band has been inactive for a number of years. It looks like they called it quits in 2006, but regrouped in 2009. It looks like they are/were a four piece from Maryland. Other than that, I got nothing. Who cares, anyway! The point of this shit is to talk about fucking awesome albums. Sometimes I worry that certain albums impress me mostly because of their mythos or technical liner note-type bullshit. 'Sirens of Silence' is an album that speaks for itself and I like itr for its own sake.

This is part of my petty attempt to abandon metal cliches such as "howling vocals", "pummeling double bass" and "skull crushing guitars". They all apply here. Swarm of the Lotus is very prescient about thier use of metal cliches though, as evidenced on "Call to Abandon". You find yourself more lost in the structure of the song than the sick-made grooves that comprise it. Before you finish thinking to yourself, "What the fuck? Is that a guitar or a bass? Holy shit..." the band has moved into even more dense and chaotic territory. As is the case with so many amazing albums, Kurt Ballou (Converge) helmed the production on this. The result is that trademark gritty yet clear heavy sound, centrally focused on textures and distorted overstatement while retaining instrumental clarity.

If you like doomy, sludgy, proggy metal than this is your shit. Do I really need to throw the Isis-Neurosis-Mastodon-Converge card here? Well, there it is. In a genre benchmarked by so many amazing albums by so many legendary bands, it's a wonder anybody tries anymore. But holy shit am I glad that they do, because just when you think you've heard the limits of awesomeness you end up drunk at the record store buying everything that says Mastodon on it only to stumble home and discover Swarm of the Lotus. God bless metal. Actually, scratch that. Smoke crack and worship Satan!