Review Summary: You can't punish the indifferent, watch the clock...
“We’re not a happy listen”
One of the qualifiers frontman Dan Thomson uses to prepare listeners for experiencing lowheaven doesn’t give the warm and fuzzies (probably the point), but it’d also be appropriate to note that while
Ritual Decay indeed isn’t a happy listen, it certainly wasn’t a happy creative process either. Thomson was greatly affected and lost a lot during the pandemic in the events leading up to the creation of lowheaven. He lost friends, his health, even his previous band, the brilliant Sparrows, to the isolating changes forced on the world. His response was to channel his melancholy into another musical venture focused not on the silver linings of his situation, but its dark clouds.
Ritual Decay is a product born of not only of mental anguish, but self-imposed physical toil. Everything to put the group’s headspace in a dark place was considered and many of them undertaken. The group recorded
Ritual Decay and the well-received EP
Collapse in an old church in New Jersey, the group would consume media like old David Cronenberg films and force themselves to write and record late into the night with little sleep in order to properly convey the stressful and isolating feel they were gunning for. Luckily, the abuse works, and
Ritual Decay is an engrossing, dark album that deftly avoids the typical pigeon holes you’d expect a group like this to fall into.
Lowheaven avoids these through the fluid structuring of their tracks and the creative choice to let the suffocating atmosphere they create tell their story rather than any trappings of genre. There are elements of post-metal, blackened punk, and post-hardcore throughout
Ritual Decay, all of which are twisted and bent at will to tell lowheaven’s depressive stories. The first three tracks of
Ritual Decay shows the band’s command over these elements and their sound. While the opener “In Grievance” introduces listeners to the aforementioned suffocating atmosphere by way of a brilliant production job, it also introduces a tactic lowheaven utilizes to great effect, Thomson’s vocal melodies. As a stitch between the more emotionally charged sections, his melodies haunt the tracks on
Ritual Decay while contributing wonderfully to its isolationist message. “Chemical Pattern” is the punkiest track on the album and stands out immediately amongst the more deliberate pacing on the rest of the album. “Cancer Sleep” is the one holdover from the band’s 2023 EP, and just like then, its apocalyptic feel both meshes with
Ritual Decay’s intent while also distinguishing itself as an interesting, well composed song.
Even on an album of stand outs, “Amherst” prominence is striking. It’s a legitimately beautiful track characterized by more of a post-rock structure of swelling instrumentation leading to a cathartic apex. A reprieve from the relentlessness of the rest of the album, “Amherst” is definitely the ballad of
Ritual Decay. And made even more poignant by the juxtaposition of its music and its meaning, described by the band as a song about the finality of decomposition and death.
Ritual Decay is unabashedly and unrepentantly bleak, but it’s also not just swimming in own schmaltzy depression. The care given to each track to marry the emotion with the music is evident, and the music itself is powerful and thoughtfully constructed. While the decision to incorporate a bevy of different genre trimmings may not ring trve enough for fans of any of them, it shows that lowheaven are trve musicians, and with
Ritual Decay, have gifted us a thick slab of metal to feast on, even if there’s some mold growing on the side.
