SUBROSA
More Constant Than The Gods
Stream + Review

I think it is very safe to say that most metal bands don’t particularly value songwriting.  This is more prevalent in some permutations than others, but particularly in the doom/sludge/stoner vortex, the only considerations for some seem to be “are we playing the riff?” or “are we playing a clip of one of us ripping a bong?” Granted, I love that clip, and it’s kicked off many a classic riff, but those two in combination can only keep a song, let alone a career, going for so long.  Eventually, I want something more.

Subrosa has just the skills to fix that.  This Salt Lake City band’s fourth release, More Constant Than The Gods, moves and sways like the deck of a sinking ship, tilting from crushing riffs to night-sky expansiveness with a crucial ear for harmony.  “Cosey Mo” builds from a bluesy riff into its protracted, four-minute climax of swirling violins and soaring vocals, as singer and songwriter Rebecca Vernon monastically repeats her mantra of “burning/instead of you.”  She repeats that image, adding “ire” on closer “No Safe Harbor,” this year’s sludgy piano ballad to beat, droning flute and electric strings flying high overhead.

Doom with a taste for atmosphere isn’t new, however, and it isn’t only what Subrosa does right here.  Rather, most of these songs inhabit structures that your parents or grandparents would recognize.  Though stretched past the 10-minute-mark in all but one case, these are undeniably songs, with melodies and refrains and codas that betray a band interested in craft and polish, the days of insular noisemaking long passed.

Take the record’s most successful song, opener “The Usher.”  Three minutes of slowly-picked bass thrum under first female and then male voices, the two never quite meeting as feedback loops and violin saws and tension builds.  After a few seconds of silence, the hammer comes down, and sludgy guitars and drums enter the picture, eventually joined by delay-drenched pizzicato strings that swirl wildly-dissonant figures to a furious downbeat.  As music goes, it’s explicit, illustrating more than evoking.  “All of my life I’ve been waiting for you” Vernon howls in harmony with Kim Pack and Sarah Pendleton, the group’s violinists, and you see, instead of simply feel, her meaning.  It’s powerful stuff.

The central trio of Vernon, Pack and Pendleton, the only constants throughout Subrosa’s career, are its most powerful forces.  Though not always omnipresent, the latter members’ violins are the band’s most distinctive element, oscillating between Godspeed-style elegiacal tones and distorted madman swirls, like those of Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis.  When their vocals harmonize with Vernon’s, as on the mournful minor-chord sludge of “Fat of the Ram,” the result is of a non-corporeal hallucination, echoes of echoes fading through time.

Though some of their vocal melodies and within-song transitions feel a little rough, in need of a guiding hand or a little more practice, Subrosa display a phenomenal gift for subtlety, one that is pretty much unknown in a genre defined by Dopesmoker and Dopethrone.  “No Safe Harbor” closes out with a droning hammered dulcimer solo, and the tiny plinks and plunks of a xylophone intimate their selves elsewhere on the record.  And to their credit, the violins of Pack and Pendleton never become generic place-markers for beauty or melody, instead generating more noise than the more traditionally ‘rock’ part of the group.

More Constant Than The Gods is a high-water mark for Subrosa, as well as among their peers.  It thriftily balances tone, noise and nuance in a really, truly exciting way.  Dreadlocked dudes with terrible tattoos: the ball is in your court.