Bong - Beyond Ancient Space [Ritual Productions - 2011]Uk Doom meet psychedelic sludge outfit Bong brew up a deeply heady, dense & weighty mixture of lo-fi, stumbling and stoned guitars, bass and drums, with the added tripped out featuring of twanging sitar & mumbled vocals ‘n’ chants added into the thick doomed mix. “Beyond Ancient Space” is the bands latest’s shot of spaced & drug hazed doom, and on offer here are just three tracks that run between 25 minutes & just shy of the half an hour mark a pice. Each track here is a stumbling, twanging, darkly hazed and spaced-out psychedelic doom jam fest of the highest order- the tracks just seem to expand on & on like watching hash smoke slowly drift off into the night sky. Each track shifts from been slow-ish to mid pace in it’s feel, and really there’s only the loosest of jam type structures to all of the tracks here. Imagine if you can slowed down & jammed out Electric Wizard meeting a heroin strung out Popol Vuh, or a wound down early Hawkwind meeting a running down & hazed Sleep via guitared-up early Tangerine Dream- you’ll get the rough idea of what to expect here. All three tracks are rewarding & entrancing in their feel, and each track does shift and altering along it’s length, though none of the three tracks are that distinctive or memorable in there own right. So really the three tracks mesh together into one huge & spaced-out doomed head- fucking whole, and this album is better taken as a album in three parts instead of three stand alone tracks. All told an enjoyable, spaced-out and doom bound jam ride- certainly for those who like their doom slowly uncurling, seeminly endless and psychedelic Roger Batty
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