Bandcamp Every band with a single faces the same problem: the song you send out is the song people judge you by, and it is almost never the song that explains you. Clegane have made that gap unusually easy to measure.
“Mutt” is the second single from Ocean of Black Thoughts. It is also the shortest track here at under four minutes, the loudest in average level, and the one that moves least between its quiet and its loud passages. It is a good song and it is the most compressed thing on the album by a distance. The title track that closes the record is more than twice as long and opens roughly four times the range between soft and heavy. If you have only heard “Mutt”, you have heard Clegane at their most contained.
Ten years to the ocean
The trio formed in 2015 and have spent the decade since working the seam between nineties grunge and modern doom: a split with Father Merrin in 2018, another with Fatima in 2023, White of the Eye in 2022, squats in Switzerland and then the Purple Stage at Hellfest last year. Olivier Millot recorded and mixed this one, Thibault Chaumont mastered it at Deviant Lab, and it comes out on ALMOST FAMOUS.
Six tracks, forty two minutes, and the shape is front-loaded with patience. “Abandoned Temple Fate” opens on nearly ten minutes and takes its time getting to the wall. “A Room Full of Strangers” spends its first stretch as something almost intimate before the riff arrives. Neither hurries.
The closer earns the title
“Ocean of Black Thoughts” is where the record stops being a good doom album and becomes a specific one. It runs the widest distance between quiet and loud of anything here, by a long way, and it uses that space for genuine ambient passages with the sound of water in them before the weight comes back. The album is named after this track and the track is named after the sea, and for once the sleeve, the title and the arrangement are all pointing at the same thing rather than three different ones.
It is also the darkest piece on the record, sitting several hundred hertz below everything else. That is the right place for a closer called this to sit.
Where it gives ground
In the middle. “Luminose” and “Sun Decay” both run the same quiet verse into loud chorus structure, and after “Abandoned Temple Fate” has already shown you a ten minute version of that idea, two five-and-six minute versions in a row feel like the band filling a side rather than developing an argument. They are not bad songs. They are the songs you would cut if someone made you lose eight minutes.
So
Recommended, and more warmly than the caveat suggests. The two long pieces at either end are genuinely strong, the band have found something of their own in a space where most acts just sound like their influences, and the closer is one of the better album-ending tracks I have heard this year. The reservation is a middle stretch that repeats a structure the opener already did better. Start at the end if you want to know whether this is for you, and then go back to the beginning, which is where it actually starts.
The album’s dynamic range is wildly uneven, and that unevenness maps onto the running order rather than scattering. “Mutt”, the single, sits around two decibels louder in average level than anything else here and holds just over seven decibels between its quietest and loudest passages, the narrowest on the record. The closing title track opens more than twenty eight decibels, four times as much, and carries the lowest tonal centre of the six at 1828 hertz against 2236 to 2693 for everything else. “Abandoned Temple Fate” is the second widest at over eighteen. The low midrange is consistently thin across all six tracks, between eight and twelve percent of total energy, which is what gives the record its cutting rather than muddy quality even in the heaviest passages. Nothing has been flattened, peaks hold ten to thirteen and a half decibels above average throughout.
Standout tracks: Ocean of Black Thoughts, Abandoned Temple Fate, A Room Full of Strangers
