OneMetal.com music REVIEW:
Hull – Sole Lord

Brooklyn-based quintet Hull have been raising eyebrows in the underground metal scene with their engrossing blend of Neurosis-esque post-metal ambience, Mastodon-like downtuned southern groove, intricate progressive structures and psychedelic doom rumblings. Sole Lord is their first full-length album, and it showcases a band with a style that’s at once difficult to pigeonhole, experimental, and yet impressively focused.

The album begins with quiet, delicately strummed clean guitar chords and not a lot else – each chiming chord is left to fade away into the either, until the whole band explodes into the picture with gruff bellows, heavy-handed drumming and guitars that blend crunchily distorted power chord avalanche with bluesy, meandering leads. The band utilise a triple-guitar attack that allows them to layer ringing clean arpeggios over jam-room lead noodling and strident, aggressive rhythms, and every possible permutation of the three approaches is touched upon throughout Sole Lord. ‘Transition’, for instance, builds gradually from Mogwai-esque scratches, volume swells and ringing arpeggios to a sudden cave-in of rumbling, apocalyptic chords, backed up with what can only be described as harmonised hollering from the vocalists.

Ah yes, the vocalists – another particularly intriguing aspect of Hull‘s sound, aside from their layered and diverse guitar arrangements, are the hoarse, roaring vocals that range from the guttural, death metal-like growls halfway through ‘Immortal’ to the occasional choral moans that recall Gregorian chanting, by way of more melodic (yet still endearingly unpolished) exhortations like the refrain of ‘this deed will carry me home’ that mark the climax of ‘Healer’.

So far, I’ve been picking out individual moments of the tracks, but really, that’s something of a fool’s errand with Sole Lord. The tracks all segué almost seamlessly into each other, and a look at the ‘Saga’ section of the band’s website reveals the album to have quite a detailed and epic story to tell. Sole Lord is definitely best absorbed as a whole, allowing the listener to be transported by the shifting moods and atmospheres – hell, there’s even a mid-album interlude, in the form of ‘Wrath Of The Sands’ – a sound collage made up of droning feedback, distorted and delayed pick-scrapes, volume swells that spin and dance around the stereo field and washes of cymbals that creates the impression of being lost and disoriented in the middle of a sandstorm.

So, as you might have gathered, Sole Lord is a challenging and unusual listen, from a band clearly unconcerned with fitting in with anyone’s preconceptions. On the one hand, this makes for a refreshingly original listen for those with a hankering for something a little more on the esoteric side – on the other, I can see the tonal shifts from crushing, down-tempo sludge to more ethereal, prog/blues jamming becoming frustrating for listeners more invested in one side of the equation or the other. The vocal approach, too, could be a sticking point for some – the raw-throated yelling approach could easily be viewed as abrasive. Speaking personally though, I find Sole Lord to be an excellent debut album from an impressively individualistic group, and I look forward to hearing more from them.

Hull’s MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/hull
The End Records’ Website: http://www.theendrecords.com

Bottom Line

Atmospheric, engrossing, and refreshingly original, Sole Lord combines pyschedelia, prog, post-metal and doom to suitably trance-inducing effect.