Duos may be all the rage right now, but Ghold are nowhere near the lineage of White Stripes / Black Keys / Royal Blood. Bearing bass and drums and vocals that lie a million miles back in the swamps and megalithic powerchords crash like meteors, they owe more to early Earth in their dark, doomy drone leanings. But unlike the amorphous hum of ‘Earth 2’ or anything by Sunn O))), the focus on devastatingly strong rhythm makes Ghold a different kind of proposition, and ‘Of Ruin’ is a strikingly original album.
Often, I quote press releases to highlight their absurdity, either because they’re poorly written, so far off the mark in terms of what the band actually sound like, or because they’re plain bollocks. That isn’t the case here, when I quote: ‘Intrinsically heavy and elastically supercharged, Ghold create a strain of viscous rock that is as plainly devastating as it is capricious, pushing down the scales in a myriad of manners to achieve an ever heavier outcome.’ This isn’t empty hyperbole: this is actually what Ghold do on the six tracks that comprise ‘Of Ruin’.
That those six tracks all run for in excess of five minutes, and average significantly more (check the 11-minute behemoth that is ‘Odic Force’, gives a sense of the album’s grand sense of scale. There’s no meandering mid-section, no ambient filler, no noodling around: each track is dense, solid, a tightly-worked roar of brutality, that at the same time has a cerebral appeal. They also lock into some seriously solid grooves. With changes of tempo and some definite structures in place, ‘Of Ruin’ explores rock tropes and takes them to another realm. And just as they’re capable of nailing a riff, they’re also more than capable of sonic eruptions on an earthshaking scale.
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Drums and bass, but very much not drum ‘n’ bass, ‘Of Ruin’ is truly something else.
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