Primitive Man – Observance (Review)

Primitive Man are a doom band from the US and this is their fourth album.

I confess to being a huge Primitive Man fan. If you’re unfamiliar with their horrendous works, check out (deep breath) – here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Observance brings us a massive new 68 minutes of material to get pulled down into the murk by.

Observance is Primitive Man in their grimmest, rawest incarnation, yet concurrently sees them explore new avenues of fear, loathing, and despondency. There is a heavy, emotional burden that sits behind this record. Observance gives it form and expression via doom sludge malevolence that’s intoxicatingly thick and immersive, yet also strangely expansive. The album embraces the components of the band’s sound that deal in noise and sonic terror, but while these aspects are embedded throughout the songs, there’s also a lot more going on. Primitive Man have succeeded in adding another layer of texture and detailing to the nightmarescapes that they drag the unwary listener through.

The music is tense and filled with horror. It’s steeped in abrasive doom heaviness and merciless sludge misery. However, it also contains a greater amount of atmospheric shading than we usually get from Primitive Man. Make no mistake, Observance dishes out a horrific, hope-ending bludgeoning, as you would expect; this is not nice music. However, it also contains previously buried streaks of warped colour and malignant light that have slowly forced their way through the black abyssal depths, simultaneously shattering and reinforcing the suffocating heart of darkness that have been birthed from. In this way, Observance convincingly uses worldbuilding and mood-focused used tools more often than much of the band’s past material. It’s all relative of course; this is still a disgustingly bleak and murderously harsh set of tracks. Put differently, the unrelenting grim darkness has fractured in places, allowing new shades of unlife to infect the whole, sickening and corrupting all around it.

Observance is probably Primitive Man’s most well-rounded and well-developed release yet. It achieves this without overly sacrificing the pure onslaught of dread-inducing punishment that the band are known for, which is no mean feat. Primitive Man have summoned a predator that swims in the band’s usual polluted waters, but also travels wider, into newly discovered oceans of filth. Observance is devastatingly good.

Essential listening for any fan of pain-ridden doom and sludge.