Doomed in Space:
Before the Eyewall
Self Titled Album Review + Stream

A few months ago I witnessed a band swing by the Bay Area for a couple shows and their set almost forced me to my knees. I’m talking about Before The Eyewall, a spychedelic progressive doom metal band from Columbus, Ohio. The pummeling this band delivered live was both completely unexpected and massively awesome so right after witnessing their painfully crushing live performance I also decided to check out their recently self-released self-titled album, and sure enough I was not disappointed: this pup yields the force of mammoths and thrusts the energy of entire galaxies through your sorry ear ducts with colossal force. Before the Eyewall’s music is completely instrumental, and this peculiar trait of theirs makes their entire sound more like a voyage than anything else. The band can simply space out and solo and stack huge riffs upon riffs for days with out having to give any breathing room to a singer or even things out to accommodate any lyrics, and this definitely paves the way for an unusually atmospheric and introspective listening experience.

The result is gigantic overflow of fucking destruction wrapped in a storm of cosmic winds. A humongous psychedelic ordeal of immense proportions. The riffs are immense, recalling bands like Ufomammut, Yob, Neurosis and even Sleep, but what sets these guys aside from the rest is their ability to make you travel with their riffs through their spiraling architecture of instrumental composition. At any given second during the listening things could get all of a sudden painfully weird and trippy too. The band’s riffs and solos are crushing and colossal, just how you would expect from mammoth doom riffage, but they always leave room for weird moments of calm and eerie passages of dream-like psychedelic weaving that make you wonder if you got sucked into a wormhole or something. Some moments in the album are just downright trippy as hell and you have the feeling that Hawkwind or some weird German Kraut rock band from the seventies got on stage at a Neurosis concert to bust out some jams with atmospheric sludge legends. I’m not saying that no one had ever gone down that path before, but Before The Eyewall have managed to pull it of in an extremely interesting way, learning the lesson of the maestros while not getting misled by them into any kind of flat and sterile imitation. Instead these boys have managed to craft a formula all of their own and made the vocal-less approach work to their total advantage. The whole work is another awesome example of the post-metal scene that has developed in the Mid West in the last few years, and along with bands like Northless, Lungs, Minsk and so on, Before The Eyewall is another great addition to this extremely admirable scene.