Review: Swamp Coffin ‘Drowning Glory’
Rothertham’s Swamp Coffin began life in 2016 with vocalist/guitarist Jon Rhodes and drummer David Winstow looking for a way ‘of keeping a pair of grownups out of trouble for a few hours’. Their monstrously heavy debut for APF Records back in 2021 mixed the thick, sludgy sound of the NOLA scene with intense hardcore pummelling and a typically British sense of humour. It was big on crunching sounds and frustrated anger, unleashed in six cathartic rounds of explosivity that saw them talked of as nihilistic heirs to the original incarnation of Nottingham’s Iron Monkey.
The release of Noose Almighty should have been a celebration of the hard-fought victory in overcoming the sense of disenchantment with the world but instead, the day before the album’s launch saw bassist Martyn White attempt to take his own life and shortly before the release, a double family tragedy befell the band where White and Rhodes both lost close family members.
With White recovered and time passed the band would find the strength to come together and channel this ‘curse’, which they refer to it, as both Noose Almighty and 2019’s Flatcap Bastard Features EP were motivated by the death of Rhodes‘ brother in law in 2017, on the day their first demo was to be recorded, and the house fire 9 months later that left him and his family homeless. Their sophomore album continues to deal with alienation, expanding the themes of mental health and grief in their inimitable, uncompromising manner by making sheer fucking heavy metal.
The resultant album Drowning Glory consists of seven tracks, clocking in at a tight forty-five minutes of some of the most bludgeoning cacophony that has been released since, well… the last Swamp Coffin album. A groove-packed, distorted barrage of lurching, dystopian nightmare fuel staring in the face of the horrors that crawled from humanity’s darkest places and spits defiance in their face.
The lumbering opening of Know You’re Worthless immediately sets about stomping all over any notion that this will be anything less than the definition of crushing. As the glancing feedback from Rhodes clashes with the ferocious rhythm section, it feels like the band are only using this technique of rearing back so they can get more momentum behind themselves to punch you in the face. The jangling isolated guitar is joined by a building snare only for Swamp Coffin to slam into full gear with the feral vocal rasps. Amid this maelstrom, they still manage to bring shades of melody, progression and groove; surrounded by the sheer amount of brutality and scarcely contained disgust, it shouldn’t feel this accessible and yet every pause heralds the return of another bluesy, rolling refrain that gets your head nodding to the infectious hooks.
This Was Always Going To End In War suffers no such delusions of nicety with the band hammering straight into raw, churning power while Rhodes gurns and bellows his lungs out. Even when the track opens out into more extended passages that serve as some relief, the thick, fuzzy sludge is still oppressive and suffocating. When the verses return, Winstow hammers the kit like the sound of raining anvils on abandoned factories and the bowl-shaking low end of White’s bass rattles the speakers in a manner that could have knocked the pictures off next door’s walls for all I know.
A groove-packed, distorted barrage of lurching, dystopian nightmare…
The lush ringing intro of the title track, Drowning Glory, momentarily comes as a light relief before the hammer fall of the lurching walls of sludge smashes the calm into oblivion. Striking a balance between keeping a sense of melody and violent, frustrated, pounding, Swamp Coffin opts for a slow burn with atmospheric beauty that snakes through riffing so seismic it could level buildings. The vocal snarl and howl with misanthropic venom before a divine solo breaks out over the torturous crawl.
Hypocritical Mass drops back down to a similar slouching, faltering pace as the opener, but here the lyrics give more space for Rhodes to vent his discontent. Employing a similar style of beat downs to the likes of EyeHateGod or Crowbar if they had been raised on a diet of shite British weather and cheap lager rather than Creole and Smack, the heightened strains of the beginning gives way to an avalanche of unrivalled cro-magnon pounding that delights in the slow tumbling guitar.
Chapter And Hearse sees a return of the gallows humour that hangs over the band like a noose (almighty) and Windstien-like screeching chunks of cavernous blues that ring with stately melody. As the track breaks down into a quiet passage with a raving sample bemoaning the claustrophobia of modern life and the lack of purpose and direction, the band crank the tension showing restraint and a light touch that only serves to make the aural devastation of Drowning Glory all the more acute.
The rumbling Terminally Cursed is another crawl that stretches the dynamic range of the album, pulling back from simply battering the listener into submission, Swamp Coffin opt for light, meandering guitar runs and slow-burning levels of texture and speed that create room for the tag team of Rhodes and White to bare their soul through their instruments. Alternating between guttural howls and multi-layered screams, the vocals reach an impassioned mantra of ‘It’s never getting better’ as the double bass thunders in the background.
Ending with the sickening back and forth of As Cold As Blood, the band keep the riffs chugging along with hypnotic rage. Part stoner, part grooving, hardcore-influenced prog the track flexes and expands around the direct ‘No one’s gonna fucking save you’ hook that somehow pulls together the conflicting elements that seem at war which each other. Spitting the words with pure venom, this is the trio at their most focused and direct. After a dramatic stop and more sinister sampling, the last few minutes writhe in ultra-slow, repeating refrains and death metal roars.
Having clawed their way back from unimaginable events, the time away has helped the band regroup and seethe at the world around them, harnessing it to express their turmoil and trauma in the most violent way they can muster. Downing Glory isn’t just another relentlessly heavy offering from the seemingly endless supply of audio nasties that APF can summon at will, it is a personal triumph and a defiant snarl from a beast that won’t stay down.
Label: APF Records
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Mark Hunt-Bryden
