Disappearer

With a moniker taken from a Sonic Youth tune, Boston’s Disappearer make major waves in the experimental arm of the metal galaxy. Culled from a two-song demo, their eponymous debut succeeds where Pelican and Red Sparowes turn tedious. The epic 12-minute opener "Crownfire” is very Isis-like in stature and in accumulation of riffage. Peaking halfway through, the song then begins its lengthy denouement of cymbal crashes and vertigo-inducing chords, before turning around and doing the same thing a second time, with an even louder apex at the coda. "Rust/Dust” begins on drummer Ryan Begley’s upper toms, shifting the thunder to Doomriders bassist Jebb Riley; the tempo follows a different path, with some intriguing offbeat shuffles. A spacey, dark ambient passage prefaces "Universal Fog,” like Thomas Köner covering Aube, and then the band begin layering chords end to end, gradually cranking up the volume like a glacial floe. Midway through, pedal effects briefly reprise "Crownfire” but it’s only a momentary mimicry as the cut blossoms in its own sonic bravura. Molding the Neurosis template in their own image, Disappearer hold much sway in a subgenre topped by Transmission0, Callisto and Cult of Luna.