I know I know, stoner rock is boring if it's instrumental. That's a general rule that holds true pretty much all of the time. Somehow, Spore Lord manage to avoid this paradigm and instead create something surprisingly exciting. The riffs on their latest offering, In The Beginning are absolutely DELICIOUS. They understand the polemic set forth by Black Sabbath and Sleep and deliver with a startling intensity. These are riffs that make sense. They have a powerful forward motion and show us that there is a hope for stoner rock. Rather than just playing over the same tired ideas Spore Lord take the genre to new heights. They aren't really doing anything particularly groundbreaking, it's just the sheer talent behind the songwriting that shines through. the fuzzed out guitar solos and strangely reassuring bass tones ring out to showcase a band who seem to understand stoner metal better than almost all of their peers. They have a certain meatiness that should not be ignored but rather reveled in, and one day, cultivated.
It's hard not to fall in love with In The Beginning, sure it's drawing on oft quoted source material and the fact that this record is entirely instrumental makes it often feel understated, but that only adds to the magic. Spore Lord apparently grasp a side of the modern heavy metal polemic that is almost impossible to ignore. They have the angular riffs that make bands like High On Fire so great, but are sufficiently laid back and stoned out of their minds such that more typical ideas can shine through. Yet through it all they maintain a vibrant guitar tone, (Which remains a highlight of the album) a potent mix and a sense of forward motion that seems to only get stronger the deeper you dig into the album. In The Beginning plays off a lot of tropes that we have all come to love, it just so happens that Spore Lord are the best at playing off of these tropes and leave me in awe as a result.
It's hard not to want to dive in wholeheartedly to In The Beginning. If you have a love for bands like Sleep and Pentagram it's hard not to enjoy what Spore Lord have to offer. Like I said, so much of this record is just a perfect distillation of everything that stoner metal has to offer, even without vocals. In fact that self-same lack of vocals actually lends the music a sense of space that I think we can all enjoy. It gives us a chance to breathe and to revel in what the band has created. Rather than suffocate under storms of sound, Spore Lord give us something deeply enjoyable that we can pick apart, that we can come back to time and time again and still find a strange sort of redemption in. In The Beginning is a example of stoner rock taken to its logical extreme, it's comforting and strangely familiar. It lets you delve into a music that matters to all of us, and this may very well be the new beginning we all needed.
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