Bandcamp Calling your fourth release Origins is a decision, and in this case a defensible one. Venus Sleeps began in 2012 as Sie Carroll alone, playing everything. Fergal Malone came in on drums the following year, Steven Anderson on guitars in 2014, and James Doporto on bass and vocals in 2024, which makes this the first Venus Sleeps album recorded by the band as it currently exists. A record about beginnings, made by a lineup that is itself new, is at least pointing somewhere.
It has been seven years since Remnants. The band used two rooms for this one, Hellfire Studios in Dublin and Deep In The Woods out in Wicklow, with Tommy O’Sullivan recording, mixing and mastering. The sleeve is an eclipse painted on visible canvas, grey on black, and it is the most restrained thing about the record.
Five tracks, forty-nine minutes. The shortest is “Beyond the Falls” at seven minutes fifty-one, which is longer than the shortest track on either previous album, and it keeps going in that direction: their first record had a three-and-three-quarter-minute song on it, their second nothing under seven, and this one nothing under seven and a half. Whatever else has changed, Venus Sleeps have steadily stopped writing short songs.
The sound is far heavier and darker than either of the other two records in today’s batch. Where they keep their low middle thin, this one puts a fifth of its total energy there on every track, and the tonal centres sit several hundred hertz below both of them. That is the saturated, slow-moving psychedelic doom the band is after, and it is executed well: the guitars have weight without turning to mud, the drums sit in a genuinely large room rather than a plate, and the vocals go low and wet and stay there. Steven Anderson is credited with saxophone as well as guitars and vocals, which is the kind of detail that makes a second listen worthwhile.
Here is the problem, and it is not a production problem. The master has not been squeezed, peaks sit comfortably clear of the average on all five tracks, so nobody has flattened this at the final stage. The flatness is in the performance. Across forty-nine minutes the record barely changes pressure: the widest gap between a track’s quiet and its loud passages is nine decibels, on “Creatures”, and the rest sit below that, with “Beyond the Falls” at under five. There are no real quiet passages, no builds that start from nothing, no moments where the band steps back so that the next riff lands harder. Everything arrives at roughly the volume everything else arrived at.
For a certain kind of listening that is exactly right. Put this on loud, let it run, and the sheer continuity of it does the work, which is the oldest trick doom has and a legitimate one. But psychedelic doom at this length usually earns its hour by moving between states, and this record chooses mass over motion for the full duration. By “Origins of Despair”, twelve minutes of closing material, the effect has stopped accumulating and started repeating.
So: yes, with a real caveat attached. Venus Sleeps are good at the thing they have decided to do, and if you want weight rather than drama this will give you forty-nine uninterrupted minutes of it. What it will not give you is a reason to go back to any particular minute, and that is the difference between a record I will return to and one I respected for an hour. “Creatures” moves more than anything else here and is the one to try first. If the lack of air does not bother you there, it will not bother you anywhere.
This is the thickest and darkest of the three records in today’s batch. The low midrange holds between 18.9 and 21.3 percent of total energy on every track, against 13.7 to 16.1 for the Procession album and 11.5 to 13.4 for the Dysphoric one, and the tonal centres run from 1882 to 2079 hertz, several hundred below either. The share above five kilohertz stays between 10.0 and 11.8 percent, the lowest of the three by a wide margin, which is where the record gets its murk. The master is not compressed: peaks sit between 12.8 and 13.8 decibels above average, healthy figures, so the record’s flatness is not a mastering decision. It is in the playing. The distance between quietest and loudest passages runs from 4.6 decibels on “Beyond the Falls” to 9.3 on “Creatures”, with a median of 6.2, which is among the narrowest spans in our measurement set, and no track on the album opens further than that 9.3. “Creatures” is also the one track with a crest below thirteen decibels, meaning it is the most continuously loud as well as the most varied, which is a fair summary of the record as a whole.
Standout tracks: Creatures, Dwell Within, Flee the Serpent
