Samothrace - 'Life's Trade'

Somewhere between Neurosis, Sunn O))), The Cure, Earth, Boris and Burzum does Samothrace fall. Chew on that a minute.

This album could’ve been straight-up black metal given the coagulated throat swellings of Bryan L. Spinks. Intended to contribute to the raw climate of Samothrace’s cumbersome note hauls, Spinks and the ambient metal group is frequently best digested with an antidepressant on their debut album Life’s Trade.

Wallowing in self-deprecating, gut-searing wails, Spinks and his chunk-busting bandmates from Lawrence, Kansas create a tone-drenched album filled with austere desolation, even as the band professes to harbor a positive outlook on life through their largely uninviting compositions.

Split into four marathon tracks, Life’s Trade benefits from an alt rock base ala The Cure and Bauhaus plowing beneath its calamitous doom reverb. Miserable at many turns, Life’s Trade is heavy music for heavy people even when it begins to show signs of energy, like the fast, momentary breakaway on “La Llorna.”

By and large, this afflicted album moves intentionally sluggish for many ticks of these drawn out laments. At times Samothrace picks up the tempo with steadier rhythms and winding guitar lines (at times stretching to climactic sonic heights such as Boris’ Wata hits without scratching her cosmic-laced head), found all over the appropriately-titled “Cacophony,” while other areas press heaviness upon the eyelids in comatose sleepwalk stretches spread throughout the languid “Awkward Hearts.”

Largely Samothrace’s scheme appears to step up the pace just a hair above the death drags of Sunn O))) and fuse Neurosis-type of distorted sound sculptures, Robert Smith dejection and apoplectic Xasthur or Leviathan-esque satanic yelps. Life’s Trade would work far better as an instrumental album, but traumatic vocals be damned, Samothrace knows how the cut a deep nerve with this disturbed and improbably buoyant excursion into madness…