Gallhammer The End

Black Metal seems to gravitate towards a heavily conceptual style of virtuoso musicianship, where complex instrumental passages and tricky time signatures inevitably dilute some of the underlying ferocity. It’s this cerebral approach, willingly embraced by many of the genre’s main players, that makes the prospect of someone stripping away the frippery, de-prettifying the music and presenting it in its most primal form a very attractive proposition indeed.

Enter Gallhammer – an exclusively female, Tokyo-based, lo-fi Black Metal duo, with stage names that hark back to the glory days of 1977 punk. Since the departure of their guitarist – Mika Penetrator – the rhythm section has been pushed centre stage where they pound out songs as a bass and drum combo. On paper the band sound like they should be brilliant and first impressions are extremely favourable. The grubby production values of their music, the brooding energy of their unschooled performances, and the unlikelihood that any of this will be punctuated by a lengthy prog-folk interlude is both exciting and a huge relief.
 
The title track resembles a colossal mechanism whose component parts are gradually falling out sync with each other. A deep bass line, inches at a slow crawl over static fuzz-tone guitar that bleeds into the nooks and crannies of the mix like background radiation. Vivian Slaughter effects a hoarse croak, reminiscent of the victim of a premature burial, attempting to clear wet soil from their throat. In the background Risa Reaper’s pile-driving cymbal blasts are shackled to a great thumping power chord that sounds like a clock chime slowly going out of tune.  

Unfortunately the novelty wears off fast. It doesn’t take long for Gallhammer to reveal themselves as a two-speed band whose songs generally locate a groove within the first 30 seconds – usually a very simple a-melodic, bass-heavy riff, accompanied by some leaden tub-thumping – and then settle into an unsatisfying holding pattern, often outstaying their welcome by several minutes.  

Rubbish CG202 is one of a pair of up-tempo numbers with a vocal screamed from the back of the throat and some frenzied tin-pot drumming. For all the energy on display the rapidly-recycled micro-riff at its core creates a peculiar inertia where, instead of propelling the song forward, all of the sound and fury is discharged violently on the spot. Being subjected to this repetitive cacophony over the course of six minutes is like standing in close proximity to a factory production line, where the noise and vibration doesn’t so much hypnotise you, as pound your senses into dumb submission.

The most variable and therefore most interesting element of Gallhammer is their front woman. The throat shredding Black Metal style of vocalisation may be strong on intensity and theatrics but doesn’t generally lend itself to nuanced performances, yet Slaughter manages an amazing repertoire of croaks, growls and screams, which are occasionally supplemented by some high-pitched yelps courtesy of Reaper. On Entropy G35 – two and a half minutes a doomy, middle-gear thrash – the latter’s squeaky backing vocals create the impression someone’s little sister walking in on band practice and deciding to join in. Aberration is effectively a duet between a feral zombie and a terrified little girl, while on Sober, Reaper’s plaintive, baby doll vocals take the form of a meandering monologue/whine.

It’s not just the sameness of the material that makes listening to The End such a tedious experience. The album’s seven tracks are poorly sequenced and top heavy, ending on two monumental dirges both of which drag on in excess of ten minutes. Wander  - which Slaughter sings in the style of someone in the end stages of a terminal lung disease - is, apart from  a detuned guitar that briefly surfaces in the right speaker, almost unyielding in its monotony.  

108=7/T-NA is at least augmented by some scratchy feedback, like someone torturing the high notes on an electric violin. It might have worked as a coda if what had gone before wasn’t so underwhelming.

It’s difficult to tell whether Gallhammer ran short of ideas while they were writing this album; whether they were destabilised by the departure of their guitar player; or whether The End is an accurate representation of the sound in their heads. The album bares strong similarities to those formative, willfully ugly records put out by Swans in the early 1980s. Eventually even that band discovered melody and wrote strange Wagnerian pop songs about telepathy and bodies being torn apart by colossal universal forces. It remains to be seem whether The End heralds the final chapter of Gallhammer V1.0 and subsequent sonic rebirth into something more diverse.  On the strength of this record the band badly need to discover another dimension to their music beyond the flattened monochrome landscape that they currently occupy.