Artist: Primitive Man
Album: Immersion
Genre: Sludge- / Doom-Metal
Country: USA
Release date: 14th of August, 2020
Released via: Relapse Records
Cover Artwork: © Relapse Records
Realizing that sometimes things hit a dead end is hard, to put it mildly. Sometimes it may be a good thing because life can move on. But often things don’t just end, they drag a lot of bad repercussions with them.
The music made by Primitive Man is the second option, beyond the measurable spectrum of worse. Immersion is the equivalent of sinking into a steaming tar pit in slow-motion while regretting every single choice in your life. It is hard to describe why someone would voluntarily listen to such negative music. There is nothing uplifting, positive or slightly motivating about this. Just blackness, never-ending.
Immersion is shorter than its predecessor Caustic but that doesn’t mean that it won’t hit you any less harder. Five songs and one noisy interlude will leave you staring at at the imaginary void lying right before you. Those songs are more compact than on Caustic. Caustic, for me, had a more atmospheric, doomy approach, while Immersion is more “song-driven”. In my books, both works for Primitive Man. It’s like being clubbed by a big sledgehammer or slowly being ran over by a bulldozer.
The best word to describe Immersion would be „unsettling“. The music itself is very slow and heavy with occasional blast-beats, harsh noises in forms of guitar-feedback („Entity“) and above it all thrones the growl of Ethan McCarthy pushing you deeper and deeper into the abyss.
Immersion will surely be on my top-5-end-of-the-year list. This is one dark monolith of an album which is released at the perfect state of time and mustn’t be missed by anyone who likes their music dark, doomy and dreary.
9 / 10
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