BLACK PYRAMID – The Paths of Time Are Vast

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8.0

• Bands:
  BLACK PYRAMID
• Duration: 01:09:00
• Available from: 03/05/2024
• Label:

• Totem Cat Records

Despite their fame as a cult band, earned in fifteen years of honest career, Black Pyramid had never managed to confirm the good impressions aroused by their debut in 2009 (an admirable sludge/stoner manual), limiting themselves to alternating courageous but not entirely in focus (“Vol. II”, where one seems to hear the Melvins grappling with a repertoire of pirate songs) to impromptu releases like “Stormbringer” and “Adversarial” – the first a pleasant collection of B-sides and rarity, the other a long EP where the comparison between the flagship song, the extraordinary sludge/doom number “Swing The Scimitar”, and the rest of the offering is rather merciless.
Reunited in 2015 after a two-year break, the three from Massachusetts took all the time necessary to finalize the intuitions present in the previous recording chapters and develop the new “The Paths of Time Are Vast”, which is now published by Totem Cat Records. The result of these efforts appears evident right from “Bile, Blame And Blasphemy”, the band's new sound manifesto, a call to arms that High On Fire would be proud of and which develops for twelve minutes of continuously changing sounds, between cadences martial, sudden electric digressions and generous concessions to space-rock.
The band had never enjoyed such brilliant production, and the credit goes at least in part to the faithful collaborator Justin Pizzoferrato, already working with Dinosaur Jr., evoked here in the sparkling guitar breaks that soften the otherwise monolithic “The Crypt On The Borderlands”, a piece that could rightfully belong to the songbook of the aforementioned Melvins.
Let's be clear, Black Pyramid don't invent anything, they simply rework the influences that inspired them; the songs they produce, however, know how to compete (sometimes surpassing them) with those of their masters, such as “Take Us To The Threshold”, which manages the magic of recreating the balance between melody and aggression that Mastodon showed off in ” Crack The Skye”.
The album shows no weak point, not even in the two suites that monopolize the second part: the three movements of the title track captivate the listener for twenty minutes, alternating rough hard blues (“The Paths of Time Are Vast pt. 2” ) and long psychedelic passages (“The Paths of Time Are Vast pt. 3”, close to the more experimental Kylesa), while in “The Quantum Phoenix” Andy Beresky's singing stands out imperturbably against a furious rhythmic backdrop (remarkable in this case the work of Andy Kivela and Eric Beaudry on drums and bass), as in an expanded version of the best Nebula pieces.
“The Paths of Time Are Vast” is, in short, the album that Baroness could have recorded after “The Blue Record” if they hadn't succumbed too soon to the temptation to capitalize on their talent, or the successor to “Blood Mountain” that Mastodon dreams of yet to publish.
For the writer, in any case, one of the records of the year.