Hey, at least they don’t have Witch or Wizard in their name. This New York instro doom quartet has played a couple of the underground doomfests in the U.S. while self-releasing four albums over the past four years—these guys are pretty prolific! And not having any vocals allows Clouds Taste Satanic to spread their wings musically as well; to wit, the four songs on this one clock in at an imposing 73+ minutes, with each track nearing or surpassing the 18-minute mark.
“Greed” (18:40) begins our descent, with a slow, lumbering guitar riff that sounds somewhat southern, and a second guitar adding some cleaner licks overtop. This one trods along the musty, dusty trail for quite some time—as you might imagine—throwing in a couple downtuned doomy riffs along the way. I could actually see some of these songs used in a spaghetti western soundtrack; hell, at some parts it almost sounds like Across Tundras played extra low ‘n slow.
“Treachery” (18:10) starts off with a slow, menacing bass intro before delving into some seriously heavy movements that sound sorta like Sleep or even early OM, with some haunting wah passages amplifying the descent into depravity, as it turns into more of a stop-start driven march. Some wah-heavy riffs signal a move toward fuzzed out space rock, giving off a groovy Mars Red Sky vibe, before going back to the march of the damned, throwing in a spacey solo or two. Then again, if the whole song’s instrumental, how do you really know what constitutes a solo? Some of the more melancholic parts past the mid point remind me of the last couple Earth albums.
“Violence” (17:48) has a similarly spacey sludge approach to the first few sequences. I can imagine the vocalist for Zoroaster screaming overtop some of these riffs. From there, we go into some mid-paced desert rock grooves like sound kinda like a cross between Kyuss and Truckfighters, with at least one riff that makes for some heavy head-nodding before going back to the original sludged doom passage. Overall, I think this is the most enjoyable of their extended cuts.
“Wrath” (18:56) is a little more mellow and melancholy than its predecessors, though it’s built on the same foundation of gritty, sludgy doom. A Kirk Windstein-style vocal would work well with some of these sections. A couple tasty stop-start riffs on this one, too. This is also probably the longest song not named “Dopesmoker” that I’ve listened to from start to finish in a while. (Couldn’t make it through that new Bell Witch, which is slightly longer than this entire album.)
Don’t get me wrong, these songs are competently executed, but when you have multiple instrumental pieces of this length, it eventually starts to become background music—it’s hard to stay focused on every nuance of every number for 18+ minutes. I bet they’re pretty heavy live, though!
cloudstastesatanic.bandcamp.com/album/the-glitter-of-infinite-hell
