Michigan’s Atmospheric Black/Post Metal quintet One With The Riverbed returns with their latest offering, Succumb, the follow-up to their 2018 cassette, Solace and their CD Absence 2021. The band continue to “draw upon the essential, elemental forces of life itself” as inspiration for their music, building on what they have learnt from their past releases.
One With The Riverbed – Succumb (Dusktone)
Release Date: 25 October 2024
Words: Jools Green
One With The Riverbed continue to push the boundaries of the Post-Metal genre a little further with each subsequent release. As a result, Succumb is a hugely atmospheric and dark, emotionally packed, all-engulfing offering of extremes, from the sublimely reflective all the way to the crushingly dark and brutal. In waves that ebb and build with a natural organic flow, it is a listen that holds your attention from start to finish.
Succumb opens on Infested, the album’s second single, which is an immediately gripping piece. It is dark and atmospheric, with pounding rhythms and scathing vocals, and it is not long before you experience the dramatic nature of the contrasting drop-aways which are eerie and bleak.
This album has you hooked from the first track.
Next is the first single released from the album Dominion. A dark raging beast from the offset, it does ebb back slightly, allowing a hugely engaging melody to course beneath, holding your attention. There is a good vocal range deployed across the duration of the track. Midway, it drops to a sublimely reflective mood that is poignantly punctuated with precise drum rhythms, dropping to virtual silence, making the sudden intense return all the more dramatic.
Opening on a haunting drive, Resolute builds with pummelling rhythms, the acidic vocals searing through, again with dramatic ebbs and builds. An equally dramatic ramp-up in pace just before midway, along with dramatic shifts and an emotive fade out, makes this a breathtakingly striking piece.
The next two pieces take a gentler opening approach. Firstly Purified, with its atmospherically reflective opener, gradually builds in waves of driving black riffing and acidic vocals. Midway, there is a hugely engaging discordant twist, returning to a more blackened ebb and build.
This is followed by Adaptation, a slow and hauntingly reflective piece to open with deep acidic vocals completing the doom-like atmosphere. With the ramp-up to a driving frenzy arriving two minutes in, you do get a superb haunting ebb and build, too. Like every piece across this album, it is deeply textured.
Dark, sinister, distant-sounding riffs open Erode, giving an air of mystery and anticipation. I love the rhythmic drum build and the way the broad-ranging vocals burst forth. Immediately, a dramatic vision unfolds in your mind. There is a gentle undulation to the pace and a continued gradual build in intensity. Again, the dramatic drops and pauses add a further tantalising edge as well as hold your attention fully. The Post-Black aspect opens up the scope further, building on the atmosphere particularly well across this eight-minute-plus track.
The final two pieces are also lengthy affairs. Firstly, Burden, which is briefly reflective as it opens but switches to an intense black drive with a bleak melodic undercurrent. Acidic, well-protracted, screaming vocals course over, dropping back to that earlier bleakly melodic, reflective pace where the acidic screams come even further to the fore alongside some deeper vocals. The pace does not rebuild until the later part of the track and not to the intensity of the beginning of the piece. However, it still manages to be a hugely powerful and weighty piece.
Then, finally, Sunlight, which almost hits the ten-minute mark. I love the slightly militaristic drum rhythms and reflective, haunting melody as it opens, a perfect backdrop for the acidic vocal delivery. It drops away further before the expected rise in pace, making it all the more intense and surprising. Another track that is quite doom-laden in some of its slower moments, as are some of the vocals. In other places, the slower melodic swathes take you on a wonderfully reflective meander. I am particularly enamoured with the drum work on this piece too.
You could easily lose yourself within the music of any of these tracks, but particularly so in this last piece.
Succumb is a superbly written and delivered album full of engaging complexities and surprises and should appeal to fans of the likes of Gloson, Ghost Bath, Harakiri For The Sky and An Autumn For Crippled Children.
It will be available as a CD or cassette, in digital format or as a stream. You can find One With The Riverbed on Spotify here.
