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1.  Onward to Perdóndaris
2.  Across the Time-stream
3.  In the Shadow of the Towers

Total playing time:  1:19:05

Release Date: May 16, 2011
Label: Ritual Records

Bong - Beyond Ancient Space

Reviewer: Chris

October 22, 2011

You have to admire something in a band that had its name out on a whopping 12 releases in 2009 alone. Bong’s second release of three this year alone is Beyond Ancient Space and admittedly at first I saw a total of three songs at over an hour and thought, This is going to be droning, boring, repetitive jargon. While I must admit this isn’t necessarily the type of music I would go for on a whim, I am pleasantly surprised that it does initiate some very tangible emotions throughout.

All through the first track, “Onward to Perdóndaris” I’m sort of transfixed into this nether worldly sphere, and without getting too trippy or opaque in my verbiage the music is dark, even cosmic in design, yet holds a casually caustic vibe throughout. The low, almost bellowing guitars sort of cover the field with a murky density that makes the music all the more credible for the 25-minutes you’re spending being entranced by it. The drumming is mixed decently, but it seems a bit buried in the mix, which adds a touch of eeriness to the whole undertaking. For some this lengthy mood-stabilizer might become arduous or too repetitive after a bit, but for the mind so encapsulated by its resonating quality it’ll find its way into your brain with relative ease.   

“Across the Time-stream” is the track that takes the dark tone to even lower levels by housing this brooding feedback-like guitar sound that almost creates a visual of some haunting spectre roaming your hallways after hours, vainly searching for a lost chasm of a pervious life. For a band that has nine live albums to its credit I can only imagine what this sound must be in the live setting. I will give in to the statement that the music does tend to repeat itself for usually the duration of a track, but what might otherwise dissuade someone from giving Bong a try is what I found initially intriguing. The almost Cure-like guitar tone in this song reminds me a little of the Disintegration era, though I’m sure the band might not understand my feeling there and that’s okay. There’s an almost gothic feel to the music that is so far removed from the typicality and blind allegiance of the main frame of the genre that it’s brilliant. Don’t mistake my use of the word “gothic” to imply that this goth music; this is most certainly stoner doom rock that simply has an edge of sinister depth painting the corners.

A lot of doom’s redeeming qualities are found in “In the Shadow of the Towers”, which begins as typically as the other tracks did with a sort of hanging intro that sort of slithers into the pores like an abscess that explodes, then sort of moves along the regions of the skin at a slow and mocking pace while you internally try to decide how to remedy this infection creeping into the air. This is the ‘jam’ of the album that sets the scene of a candlelit room with four guys just producing some sardonic and belligerent tunes for the morose individual inside us all. It’s a long and simplistic meandering through the mire and it is well worth the effort.    

I have a hard time sitting still for long periods, that’s a fact, but when an album can hold me like this does and not cause me to skip through it, it says something for the music itself. The tenacity it takes to effectively pull off this music for a generation of notoriously short attention spans deserves a lot of credit, although I know some fans of the genre might not employ such time-consuming music without variations galore. I’m thinking if you give it a shot with the right frame of mind going in you may enjoy yourself beyond your expectations.