In just two short weeks, Pombagira laid down over 80 minutes of music that would become their sixth album. It’s a seriously mighty effort. Hell, the first track, ‘The Way’ is a full 11 and a half minutes long. Heavy, earthy guitars grind out a truly megalithic swamp trudge that eventually yield to expansive, proggy-leaning sonic vistas that still smoulder and bur, It’s the vocals that really set it apart from everything else in this field, being clean and pitched up instead of the obligatory guttural growl.
The band’s focus on death and necromancy dominates the album: the title actually refers to the visceral experience of the grave dirt which presses in on the flesh during the initiatory procedure, and at times, the weight of the music is sufficient to create an experience akin to how I imagine being buried. The slow, meditative incantations of ‘Ganther’ are subtle and haunting and contrasts with the shimmering, downtuned psychedelia of ‘Endless’ which swims in a sea of cavernous reverb and overdrive.
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That ‘Flesh Throne Press’ is so varied and textured is its greatest strength. The 10-minute ‘Sorcerous Cry’ builds through some crafted country-tinged scenes before crashing through the gates of Hades in a deluge of earth-shattering guitars. The title track finds Pombagira in the kind of dark territory occupied by Sunn O))) before moving on out through a succession of different soundscapes, ranging from the ponderous to the crushingly heavy. ‘In the Silence’ is epic, epic and slides into classic / stoner rock without sounding remotely out of place, or tame. Heavy but without being inaccessible, ‘Flesh Throne Press’ is a unique proposition. It’s also one hell of an album.
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