There are certain things in life that go together. Ham and cheese, cheese and onion, Jack and coke, to name just three, but at some point in time they weren’t eternally linked. There must’ve been a rime when somebody looked at the slice of ham on their plate and thought “Well, that’s dull as hell. What happens if I stick it with this wedge of Cheddar?” There must’ve been a moment when someone looked at the Jack in their glass and thought “That tastes like elephant piss, but I want to get drunk. What happenes if I drown the shit out of it with some coke?” My point being that somebody, somewhere had to to decide to take a gamble, and that gamble paid off. Kind of like throat-singing and black metal.
When I first heard of Ashen Pall, and then scurried off to Bandcamp to check out their EP, Chains of the Grindstone, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The blurb and the tags read like the usual black metal fare that you get, but what I didn’t, for one second, think I was about to listen to was yet another great idea that can be listed among the greatest ideas of all time. Throat singing and black metal.
The music that Ashen Pall proved on Chains of the Grindstone is excellent. Well, of course it is or you wouldn’t be reading this right now. It’s hard, it’s heavy, it hits in all the right places, and it goes from zero to mental as Harley Quinn on a crank binge with such ease that it will pin you to the wall. It’s like being on a fairground ride that just slams you back against the wall with centrifugal force as soon as it kicks in.
But the real genius here, the most jaw dropping “I didn’t know I needed this in my life” is provided by vocalist Jesse Thom, who, as you have probably guessed by now, uses throat singing in place of normal black/death/extreme metal grunting/howling/screaming. And it works. Unbelievably fucking well.
It is such a counter point to the soundscape being painted around it. Where that is dark and forboding, Jesse uses his vocal chords as an instrument of their own to puncture the darkness and offer you a ray of light. It is haunting and in such a stark contrast that it takes you a few moments to realise that Jesse Thom isn’t your standard singer, but a living, walking instrument all on his own and it shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t work but it fucking does. Brilliantly.
Sometimes you have to take a risk. Sometimes that risk pays off. Other times it doesn’t. But on Chains of the Grindstone, Ashen Pall not only manage to make it work superbly, they make you realise that you’ve need the marriage of throat singing and black metal since the day you first discovered extreme music. You just didn’t know it until now.
You can get Chains of the Grindstone over on Ashen Pall’s Bandcamp Page.
