One of those groups who succeed in perfecting their chosen musical idiom so completely, and do so in such gargantuan style, that just about everyone else treading similar ground starts to seem surplus to requirements, I remain incredibly happy to have discovered the music of Bong a couple of years ago.

In fact, I love Bong to such an extent that a twelve month stretch without a new LP from them currently seems like a trying prospect indeed. To fill the aching void until their next magnum opus then, 2013 instead brought forth this live disc, recorded in St Mary’s Old Church, Stoke Newington, in 2011.

As you might expect, the sound captured here bears little trace of the cleaner, more purely psychedelic direction the band were pulling in on last year’s ‘Mana Yood Sushai’, with the necessarily muffled roar of live recorded doom metal and the unmistakable reverb of a big church building combining to make for a rather muddy, undifferentiated roar of a record. If Bong’s recent studio albums have sought to take us to celestial dreamlands or the depth of space, this one drags us right back into the bowels of the earth – a sodden, mud-choked, grave soil rumble, built around a cacophonous sub-bass drone and wah-blasted amplifier skree that recalls Sunn 0))) at their prime.

The opium-den overtones of Benjamin Freeth’s Shahi Baaja (that’s the sitar kinda thing to the likes of us) hang heavy as ever in the air, with additional formless blare from Mike Vest (here abetted by second guitarist Pete Ryde) and introductory incantations from bassist/vocalist Dave Terry meaning that by the time Mike Smith’s drums crash in about a third of the way through each side-long movement, the atmosphere is already treacle-thick and pitch black, and by the time you’re shaking your gory locks to his ball & chain dragging pulse beat, there’s no way out - you’re in for the duration.

Predictable maybe, but random taste tests from this one almost inevitably give me an image of skeletons, bones picked clean, rising from the grave; the earth throwing up its dead; Bruegel’s ‘The Triumph of Death’, and all that. And isn’t the spirit what metal, particularly doom, is all about really? Whoever that harried graphic design assistant was who struck that painting on the front of that old ‘Sabbath best-of, they were on to something. Arise! Arise! Wipe clean the surface, and return to the soil. Good times. When the rain is unceasing and even candle-light begins to seem too bright this winter, I know I’ve got just the record to reach for.

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Labels: best of 2013, Bong