A tough one to scale.

For a while now, I’ve wracked my brain trying to think of ways to tackle what the promo text admits is “difficult to pin down,” describing it as “running the gamut of traditional heavy metal, through death and doom, with post-metal and discordant influences.”

I’ve spent a stupid amount of time trying to boil all that down into a handy combo of genre tags before deciding that calling it progressive metal is probably fine. Or progressive death metal in case the former makes you think of clean vocals. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t any, and “death metal” doesn’t mean that fans of, say, eclectic black metal shouldn’t at least check out “Hermitage,” and… I’m already spinning out again.

Doom. Let’s start there, cause that’s where the album starts, and I’ve found it helpful to consider it a doom record first and foremost. While there are aggressive outbursts aplenty, mid-tempo sections such as the first two minutes of “Grey Mountain” (praise the self-titled trifecta) are closer to the norm than the exception.

We’re not talking abysmally slow, heavy doom, but rather the grooving, classic doom of acts like Candlemass or Dio-era Sabbath. That’s the mode that the album likes to return to between the frequent dips into more extreme metal, which happen multiple times per song.

When the first of these dips comes about roughly two minutes in, we meet two further defining factors of Grey Mountain’s sound. One is how sudden and surprising these shifts in tone and genre can be; zone out for 20 seconds at any given point and you might end up scratching your head at what you find yourself coming back to. The other is the phenomenal work that the lead guitar does all throughout the record.

Regarding the former, once I managed to keep my attention span up more consistently, I found that these transitions are never jarring. “A Universal Evil,” for example, starts out with this rumbling, Bolt Thrower-style death metal part, and while the rhythm guitar and drums keep that up for a while, the lead guitar soon starts to put in work to prepare you for the all-out prog part that comes along about a minute in. Disparate as the genre tropes may be, this kind of great songwriting keeps everything flowing nicely.

And as for the lead guitar, I can’t recall ever hearing someone transition so seamlessly into a solo, and certainly not as frequently. “Grey Mountain”‘s first uptick in tempo is accompanied by this spiraling riff that carries right on into the first of many solos as the rest of the band calms down again. Time and time again throughout the course of the album, the lead guitar dramatically and heroically casts off all shackles to kinda do what it wants, breaking into elaborate fretboard acrobatics in ways equally as surprising and frequent as the band’s changes in tempo and style.

We are now only halfway through the first song, and I’ve already exceeded the minimum word count. I shall therefore bow out and leave you to discover the massive, beautiful tonal shift in the final third for yourself. Honestly, an entire review could be written about damn near every song on this thing. It really does contain everything the promo text promised, and more besides. My only gripe is that the production is not always as polished as the compositions might call for; while Dan Swanö was recruited to put some finishing touches on it, it is ultimately a true homebrew effort, with the musicians recording their parts on opposite sides of the Atlantic (as I understand it).

I hope that that changes for the second album, which is reportedly already planned, because what Grey Mountain have created here is beyond impressive and immediately puts them in the league of bands that are a league onto themselves—bands like Cognos or Vhöl, who might borrow tropes from a shared pool of genres but are ultimately only comparable in how not comparable they are to anything else. I’m pretty confident that I’ll tell you about it again at the end of the year, and award it

4/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell

Grey Mountain will be out on March 7 via Eat Lead and Die Records.

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