Ethan Lee McCarthy has been making the heaviest, most unpleasant music in American doom under the Primitive Man name since 2012, and Observance is the record that consolidates everything he’s built into its most essential form. Seven tracks: “Seer”, “Devotion”, “Transactional”, “Iron Sights”, “Natural Law”, “Social Contract”, “Water.” The titles read like a taxonomy of systems under pressure, ideological, social, ecological, and the music sounds like watching those systems fail in real time.
“Seer” opens with the weight of something that has been building for years: slow, crushing, McCarthy’s vocals buried in the distortion rather than sitting above it. This is the album’s defining sonic choice, there’s no daylight between the instruments and the voice, no separation that would offer the listener a position outside the sound. You’re inside it, which is where doom this heavy puts you. “Transactional” is the album’s most explicitly political moment: the riff circles around a question without resolving it, the lyrics (what you can make of them) anatomizing exchange as violence rather than just as economics.
“Social Contract” is the album’s centerpiece, eight or nine minutes that build toward a moment of full collapse, everything falling away except the bass and a feedback tone that sustains until the track ends. “Water” closes with something closer to resignation than conclusion: a slower tempo, a riff that sounds like the end of something rather than the beginning.
McCarthy’s production choices are always deliberate and always uncomfortable: guitars tuned low and recorded with enough distortion that the frequencies interact rather than stack, bass sitting at the very bottom of the mix and occasionally threatening to swallow everything, drums close and physical with no reverb to soften the impact. The noise elements, present throughout, sometimes foregrounded, function less as texture and more as environment: the sound of systems failing, processed and amplified.
Standout tracks: Social Contract, Transactional, Water
Observance is Primitive Man at their most focused and most merciless. It’s not a comfortable record. Comfort has never been the point.
