Tooms are an Irish progressive sludge metal band and this is their second album.
Tooms impressed with their 2020 debut The Orb Offers Massive Signals, so Karst is to be approached with great interest and expectation. Tooms have delivered 48 minutes of new material, and it’s worth paying attention to.
Karst offers up a refined version of Tooms, while retaining the core of the character that made them so appealing. Karst is a step up for the band, in production values, performances, songwriting, artwork – you name it, Tooms have improved it. As they were already starting from a strong position, that makes Karst a cracking record.
Tooms mix genres and influences with maniacal glee. They compress a hundred ideas into a single song, vomit all over it, and then shove the filth in your face. Do you like it, they ask, with a sinister glint in their feverish eyes? Yes sir, yes we do.
Alongside the alluring walls of doom and sludge heaviness it was the progressive and psychedelic aspects of the band’s debut record that stood out. On Karst, the ingredients are similar, but of better quality, taken from choice suppliers, combined differently, and mutated into something strange and exotic. It’s a progressive feast of flavour and intricate sludgy experience. There’s a touch less doom and psychedelia, and a pinch more groove and prog metal worldbuilding. It’s more cohesive and dynamic, but without losing personality or that sense that anything could happen.
If the debut album liked a good riff, Karst loves one. Tooms seem to be having a whale of a time peeling off riffs and kicking out the jams, all the while also crushing the listener with heavy progressive landscapes and emotive weight. The latter two elements are important parts of Karst‘s slow-burn success; Tooms make the listener feel the whole thing as they explore these multifaceted, shapeshifting soundscapes. It’s an insidious thing, something that creeps further and further into your consciousness as you get to know the songs. With each listen the feeling and that sense of vast journeying comes out in the music more and more.
Are you ready to be swallowed whole by Karst‘s ravening maw? Are you a fan of acts like Rwake, Conjurer, Inter Arma, (early) Mastodon, Neurosis, and Today Is the Day? Do you want to listen to something a little different, but also damn bloody good? If so, then Karst is for you. Tooms have evolved, and they’re in their most well-adapted and exciting form yet.
Essential listening.
Wonderbox Metal 