Album review: Hull – Sole Lord

Just when I thought the decent albums had dried up for the summer festival season, here comes Hull with Sole Lord. In the name of saving your time: if you’re not down with glacial-paced sludge and doom metal, you might as well skip to another page. There’s probably something bright and arguably punkish that you can read us giving a good kicking to and get all upset about. G’wan now.

Still here? Great – let me tell you about your new favourite band! Now, despite the name, Hull hail not from the flat-capped north of the UK but from Brooklyn, New York… and that’s about all I know. The press release is refreshingly devoid of anything beyond that information and a brief paragraph of appropriately cod-bombastic hyperbole; they’re letting the music do the talking. And it has plenty to say to them what’s willing to listen.

Sole Lord has got the lot, like a smorgasbord of modern prog- and post-metal ideas neatly lined up on a conveyor belt for you to browse through and snack at leisure. You’ve got odd and gappy Toolish time-signature riffs, epic slo-mo riffola a la Mastodon, the soaring majestic bits of Pelican and Red Sparowes, mellow bluesy noodlings and pregnant pauses punctuated with tones that sound like they might involve the use of an eBow… and the vocals of course.

Oh yes, vocals; that’s what makes Hull stand out most of all, and though it’s not overused by any stretch of the imagination (many tracks on Sole Lord are largely instrumental) they’re wise to place it front and centre in their opening track. “Innocence” features what I can only describe as bellowed three-part harmonies, like some unusually musical and gruff pagan cult that convenes near a military airstrip. These are plainly people who’ve learned to roar their vocals as the only way of making them cut through the sound of their amps at practices and small shows; the end result is a live feel with all the imperfections on display, the ragged glory of people giving it all they’ve got. Imagine Torche after a particularly long bong session, and you’re in the right ballpark. Notes waver and crumble, throats tear, volume varies as if they’re stepping up to and away from the microphones to contribute. There are those who’d say it sounds unprofessional. To those people I say “so what?”

Because you can hear as clear as day that Hull have no shortage of musical skill available to them; not just in the guitar work and drumming but in their ear for song structures that keep things moving, making shifts from down-tuned bludgeon to gentle clean-tone tapping lines or subtle tonal swells seem not just effortless but utterly appropriate. Songs flow into one another, and what feels like an outro – the bulk of “Wrath of the Sands”, for example – turns out to have been some carefully planned wig-out where every stomp-box in the studio gets deployed to make a noise like a civilisation collapsing in time-lapse, or where everyone in the band joins into some vaguely Middle Eastern sounding descending riff. Sole Lord is slow, inevitable, crushing, unstoppable, beautiful like only ruins can be. It keeps surprising me, but it’s the surprise of the retrospectively obvious – the sort of feeling poor Watson must have had every time Holmes did his “elementary” schtuck. Why didn’t I think of that?

So, to reiterate: Sole Lord is fucking epic. If you like doom and/or stoner metal and/or post-metal, you need to add Hull to your list of bands to keep an ear open for. And someone needs to book these guys a UK tour. Now.