For the last few weeks, I have been working on my 50th article for MetalTalk. It is my own personal list of 50 of the most important stoner/doom albums since 1999. It is probably going to take me another few weeks to finish writing that. In the meantime, I, along with many others, have been smitten/bitten by Dying To Live, the debut album of Michigan’s Mothertomb. The repeated spins bodychecked that article, to the point where I had to write an album review.
Mothertomb – Dying To Live
Release Date: Out Now
Words: Sunil Singh
That review starts with the album cover, taking me back to my younger years. But my ears, perhaps paradoxically, are younger today, which is why an album as fresh as Mothertomb’s can hit me hard, because I have consciously provided space for new listening experiences.
Album art has been an important consideration for me to have the most immersive experience listening to a band’s album. People of my generation (I am 62) just used to stare at albums to decode and interpret the art while we listened to whole sides of albums.
Most of the time we were relegated to guesses as to what the fuck was going on. But if the art matched the vibe of the album, we were more than satisfied. That was my teenage experience.
Mothertomb’s Dying To Live cover is black and white. There are skulls, gravestones, and ghosts. There is also a young barefoot woman coming out of an entrance to a tomb. It is a dark image, but oddly not bleak. There is a healthy reverence for death and the mystery that comes with it. It is eerie, but you are lured in, much like the songs inside.
When I started listening to the album, I had no idea what I was in for. However, I really hoped the haunting/dark romanticism of the cover art matched the music, and the sooner that dreamy/nightmarish atmosphere could be conveyed, the better my chances of falling in love with the album.
The Summoning, even just its opening seconds, hit the bullseye of what I was feeling when looking at the cover. And I know precisely why. It is not the first time my ears have immediately fallen in love with atmosphere.
My favourite song of all time, and it has been since I heard it in 1978, is Heart’s Nada One. The main reason is that the atmosphere Nancy Wilson conjures up right away with her acoustic guitar and dreamy intro which has, in my opinion, never been matched. It is 30 seconds of the softest magic you will ever hear, conjuring up an image of a Japanese Tea Garden in some reflective end to an Anime film.
Here is a bit of what I wrote about it in my book Sonic Seducer.
“But Nada One has a magic uniquely its own, like it was plucked from somewhere mystical and eternal. Having a restorative agency wholly unique to its ineffable aura. An attraction whose seductive power lies in the softness of delivery of burning love. An attraction that also feels either once existed or will one day exist. An attraction that feels either ancient or alien.
“Are you beginning to understand why I have been consumed by this song for more than forty years? It’s my heaviest moment with music, caused strangely by a song sonically delicate. Yet, somehow, it burns with an intensity incongruous to its instrumental and vocal weight.”
Heavy is beyond the physics of sound and loudness. Heavy is a feeling. It can often be summoned in seconds. A bursting heart will always eclipse ringing ears. When both can happen, you’re flirting with godly magic.
Mothertomb, unconsciously and unwittingly, has tapped into that feminine energy, and The Summoning is the perfect song to announce that ‘space’, and patience with it. It is going to be a calling card of the band. The rest of the album is a heavenly/hellish ride of unpredictable sonic and emotional heaviness.
Balance. The feminine and masculine energies are inextricably woven throughout the album. At times they seem like they are at peace with each other, and other times they seem like they are in a final battle.
Listening to this album is both exhausting and replenishing. The band has receipts for this balance in the form of the video for Mountain Hag.
It would have been easy for the energy of the band to have centred around the vocals of Alice Gawlinski. After all, there is a fuck ton of atmosphere and attitude coming from those pipes.
Nope. This is such a balanced video in terms of integrating all the moving parts that make up a band, and ensuring that each member is highlighted and recognised for their contributions to the collective sound of the band. The musical excursion that is this song is nuanced, and all the diversions seem intentional with zero self-indulgence.
Dying To Live is an album that will always be played from front to back. No songs are to be extricated from the whole album experience. Skipping over the first song would be foolish, to say the least.
I have been a sucker for the female voice since I was a teenager. Throw in the heaviness of sound that this scene demands, I easily gravitate to Ruby The Hatchet, Electric Citizens, Acid Kings, Hippie Death Cults, Windhands, etc.
That is because both the feminine and masculine energies can, pardon my language, fuck the hell out of each other.
You can now confidently add Mothertomb to that list. It just dawned on me that the band’s name contains two important words, one symbolising birth, and another one communicating death. Together they fuse a continuum of harmony and chaos.
Their debut album will be filed by some under the Doom label. For me, and hopefully others, it will defy such categorisation because the band’s sound, attitude, A-to-Z music influences, and cosmic weight of both birth and death simply cannot be contained in such a generic and lazy categorisation.
Dying To Live is simply a masterpiece of art, emotion, and energy, all working overtime to leave the listener with a beautiful experience of modern heavy.
Dying To Live by Mothertomb is out now. Find out more about the band at Bandcamp.
