Bandcamp There is a saxophone on this record, and a tanpura, and a shruti box, and none of it is decoration. A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers, a Haarlem quintet who take their name from a Van der Graaf Generator epic, call themselves a spiritual sludge collective, and Towers of Silence is their debut proof of concept: three long pieces that use doom and sludge as a launch pad into free jazz, raga, drone and sacred minimalism. Picture OM and Sumac sharing a room with Miles Davis and a Zoroastrian sky burial, since the title names the towers where the dead are left for the vultures on the cover.
The record lives or dies on dynamics, and it lives. “The Massacre of Flour” is the standout, moving from a chaotic blastbeat storm through a minimalist ambient hollow into a monolithic doom climax, its spoken-word passages sitting bone dry and clear in the middle while the harsh screams stay buried in cathedral reverb. The closing title track is the other peak, a hypnotic, repetitive build from a dragging pulse into an overloaded, near-clipping vortex, sacred choirs floating in the high stereo field over the low harsh voice. This is drone as ritual rather than drone as wallpaper, and the room-recorded drums and huge reverb make it feel genuinely monumental.
It is not an easy sit, and it is not meant to be. The middle track, bluntly titled, is a deliberately punishing lurch into mathcore and grind chaos, a claustrophobic compressed wall that trades nearly all intelligibility for pure pressure, and the low mids stack up thick enough in the densest passages to mask some of the detail underneath. If you want comfort, look elsewhere. If you want a band using the heaviest tools to reach for something closer to transcendence, this is rare.
Towers of Silence is a singular, ambitious, dynamically masterful debut that treats sludge as one colour among many, and for anyone who likes their heavy music spiritual, improvisational and unafraid of a saxophone it is one of the most distinctive things this year. Give it a dark room and its full length. The vultures are waiting.
A spiritual-sludge collective’s debut that uses doom and sludge as a launch pad into free jazz, raga, drone and sacred minimalism, and it lives on dynamics. “The Massacre of Flour” moves from a chaotic blastbeat storm through a minimalist ambient hollow into a monolithic doom climax, the spoken word bone-dry in the centre while harsh screams stay buried in cathedral reverb; the closing title track builds hypnotically from a dragging pulse into an overloaded near-clipping vortex with sacred choirs floating over the low harsh voice, room-recorded drums and huge reverb making it monumental. The middle track is a deliberately punishing mathcore-and-grind lurch, a claustrophobic hard-compressed wall that trades intelligibility for pressure. The recurring reservation is low-mid stacking thick enough in the densest passages to mask some detail. Drone as ritual rather than wallpaper.
Standout tracks: The Massacre of Flour, Towers of Silence
