aaamusic | On 21, Jan 2013

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, genres only mean something when they’re mixed, and you can make a great band out of any and every combination of music genres you can think of. Take this band right here, the confusingly named, Baltimore based Arbouretum mix the tempos and riffs of Doom Metal and with the dynamics and instrumentation of Folk Rock, and it’s fucking awesome. I may have jumped the gun slightly by giving you my opinion on the band sixty eight words into the review but hear me out here, I’ve got to explain to you precisely why Arbouretum are as shit hot as they are, you lucky, lucky children! Formed in 2002, Coming Out of the Fog is the quartet’s seventh full album since 2004, their second released last year, and it shows. Just a cursory listen to the opening tracks shows that this is a band that knows exactly what they’re doing and loves doing it, as any band with over ten years of experience should, and while Coming Out of the Fog probably won’t propel them to stardom overnight, if there’s any justice in the world, it should gain them an even bigger cult following.

The album does kneecap itself slightly by having its best track, The Long Night; open the set, which is a bad idea at the best of times, but what a track. A slow, swaggering blues rock number that sounds like Black Sabbath had they stayed as Earth and not been obsessed with Horror films, it kicks the album off on a high that despite the best efforts of the band, they can’t quite top. They try, and there isn’t an outright bad song on the set, their sound is too interesting and too well thought out for that to be so, but coming after The Long Night’s mastery of what they do, all it can do is sound comparatively sluggish and the riffs not good enough to justify the plodding tempo. On their own they’re exciting as all hell, The Turning Weather’s distorted rumble especially sounding a lot more badass than most things on the record and the syncopation and upped tempo on World Split Open is welcome relief from the heaviness on display elsewhere. In total, this is a seriously good record, it peaks early, but it hits such a peak that it’s still pretty unmissable. Of course, any band that mixes genre’s this way is bound to leave some people in the dark so it’s not for everyone, but if you like your heavy stuff to come with a dash of something pretty much entirely new then I can’t recommend this enough.

★★★★★

Will Howard