SILVERTOMB

As winter begins to stamp its boots all over our need for sunshine, the time for miserable music to come into its own has arrived. No one did it better than TYPE O NEGATIVE, of course, and 16 years after the untimely passing of Pete Steele, two of his most loyal comrades are still finding new ways to revel in the darkness and cold. SILVERTOMB released their first album in 2019 and made it plain that TYPE O alumni Johnny Kelly (drums) and Kenny Hickey (guitar / vocals) still have the essence of that band flowing through their doom-laden veins. Wearily psychedelic and less overtly metallic than their former band, this new outfit displayed an immediate ability to summon seasonal sorrow, and on the follow-up, Kelly and Hickey are in an even more unsettling and ingenious mood. "The Interpretation Of Nightmares" is actually a fairly beautiful and elegant record, albeit one that hangs heavily with the weight of life's losses. Strident in its melodic atmospheres, but eminently capable of delivering a well-aimed hobnail to the forehead of the forlorn, this is gorgeously grim and gripping stuff.

SILVERTOMB are an eccentric band with eclectic taste. There is a real tang of woozy psychedelia from the late '60s ingrained into these songs, in much the same way that TROUBLE ventured down a BEATLES-inspired path on their later albums. After the crushing but hazy crawl of the opening "Brain Matter No God" recedes into the shadows, "The Interpretation Of Nightmares" walks slowly but steadily down an eerily enigmatic left-hand path, wherein the skewed vocal refrains of underground psych collide in slow motion with the bleary-eyed riffs of the post-TYPE O doom fraternity. "Graves In The Sky" is an utterly gorgeous song that strikes a sublime balance between airy, cosmic wonder and gritty, grinding doom. Likewise, "Distorted" is a deeply heavy, palpably unholy hymn to the void, with Kenny Hickey sounding particularly distraught and guitars that seep from a spinning kaleidoscope like veiled threats from a parallel world. Even better, "No Way To Live" offers five minutes of sluggish but bewitching magic, with riffs that sound like distant cousins of the first LIFE OF AGONY album, and a purposeful groove that rewinds to a simpler time when BLACK SABBATH bestrode the globe like the gargantuan heroes they generally were. With bursts of trippy, tremulous and grunge-like soulfulness, it is a song containing emotional multitudes, and the best thing anyone from this band has put their name to since "Dead Again" put an unexpected period point at the end of Pete Steele's story in 2007. The closing, gently FLOYD-ian "When Will You Learn" is very nearly as good, and after a sparse but satisfying 33 minutes, SILVERTOMB nobly leave us wanting more.

Lest we forget, Johnny Kelly is currently playing drums with QUIET RIOT, so he is not entirely consumed by musical waves of grief and regret. But this colorful and charismatic record does seem to emanate from the same NYC shadows that gave us "Bloody Kisses" and "October Rust" all those years ago. These masters of the morose are willing to let more light into their creative lives these days, but this is still an admirable act of glumness, aimed squarely at the terminally tearful. Never cheer up.